You may have heard about sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Reporting Initiative that now requires bigger companies to adjust their reporting in order to increase transparency. At the same time, you may have a funky feeling that there’s quite a bit of hot air and greenwashing going on around there. So how do we truly transition towards more sustainability? Why may we also want to think about more resilience? And what inner transition is required to make this big outer shift? In this talk, I give a brief (necessarily incomplete) overview of the last decade of sustainability research in and outside of software engineering and sketch a vision of what’s to come if we truly embrace a transition, and what may happen if we don’t.

Birgit Penzenstadler is faculty at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Lappeenranta Lahti University of Technology, Finland (before: California State University Long Beach). Her research focus is how neuroplasticity practices can support engineers and other computer workers in improving their presence, creativity, cognitive abilities, immune systems, sleep and overall resilience (for details, see https://www.twinkleflip.com). She has been researching the relation between sustainability and software engineering for a decade and focuses on artifact-based requirements engineering and requirements engineering for sustainability. Her expertise includes requirements elicitation, analysis, design and documentation techniques, for example sustainability goal modeling, as well as artifact models, quality modeling, tool support, and process improvement (see https://www.sustainabilitydesign.org and http://birgit.penzenstadler.de). Penzenstadler received a habilitation from the Technical University of Munich’s Faculty of Informatics. She’s a member of IEEE and ACM. Contact her at birgitp @ chalmers.se