The group’s thematic interests cover the intersection of technology and society, particularly in the pressing areas of education, elder care and needs, and integration of immigrants and refugees.
Our main focus is on people who, for various reasons, are socially isolated, including children and adults with long-term illness or disabilities, the elderly, immigrants, and refugees. Today’s tech revolution offers new opportunities for inclusion of these groups, but we know little about the longer-term and unintended consequences they entail.
Further development of high-quality, useful tech products and digital services requires interdisciplinary cooperation between users, researchers, and tech producers. In order to study the tech revolution’s effects over time, different theoretical perspectives and a broad spectrum of methods are required. WATT aims to create just such an interdisciplinary forum for cooperation.
Head of research group
Members
More about the research
Our goals are to
- be a leading group of researchers, users and tech developers within the area of welfare technology targeted to socially isolated groups
- generate interdisciplinary knowledge about today’s welfare technology, and shed light on important themes such as knowledge translation, ethics, and the relationship between humans and machines
- develop methods that can be used to capture the tech experiences of individuals with disabilities, children, youth and elderly, who encounter obstacles when taking part in everyday life
- combine OsloMet’s research competence with No Isolation’s technological competence in order to further develop existing technology for use in other professions within OsloMet’s pedagogical profile
- involve students in WATT’s work through work experience and bachelor's and master’s theses
WATT is an interdisciplinary research group at OsloMet, based at the Department of Social Work, Child Welfare and Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences. From OsloMet, WATT also includes researchers from the Faculties of Technology, Art and Design and of Education and International Studies, as well as the Consumption Research Norway (SIFO) centre. WATT also has members from the start-up No Isolation, as well as Oslo municipality.
Partners
- NoIsolation (noisolation.no)
- Trish Greenhalgh, Interdisciplinary Research in Health Sciences (IRIHS) (phc.ox.ac.uk) at The Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford.
