Digital Sustainability Hub
We study what digital systems do to the environment, to people and to the economy, and build the methods that make it visible.
Digital sustainability is more than greener tech. It means rethinking the systems, incentives and cultural myths shaping our digital world, from business models built on overconsumption to design choices that normalize excess.
What we do
Three lines of work, each producing a different kind of awareness.
Measuring perception
We bring executives and managers to compare what they believe about digital systems with what the evidence shows, and we measure both the distance and the shift that follows.
Reading what digital does
Digital technologies do not add themselves to the world: they reconfigure who does what, with which information, and under whose control. Our framework reads those effects, one actor at a time.
Making the weight tangible
We restate numbers nobody can feel in quantities anyone knows, declaring sources and showing disagreement between estimates instead of hiding it.
We do not deliver decisions. We deliver what an informed decision requires.
Digital Sustainability Manifesto
Where the centre stands: the principles that guide how we read the digital and what we ask of it.
Ongoing Projects
Reputation Unsustainability: How Review Platforms Destroy Trust
Review platforms promise transparency but generate digital pollution: fake reviews, arbitrary removals, pay to defend services. We are building an index to measure it.
Learning Without Knowing: The Illusion of Competence in the Age of Generative AI
Generative AI is reshaping how we learn. The question is whether it builds new knowledge or quietly erodes the competence we think we are gaining.
Panel Misconduct in Online Surveys: Rethinking Incentive Structures for Data Integrity
Two hidden practices in the online survey supply chain distort samples and corrupt datasets. We are producing hard evidence of how panel incentives degrade data quality.
Hu-DSH
Hu-DSH is the research infrastructure for technology transfer through which the centre's methods and instruments reach organisations, in laboratory, digital and measurable form.
Funded by Regione Lombardia.
Partner with DSH
The centre is opening to companies and to technology providers, for different reasons. Companies come to find out what digital systems are doing to them, without having to rely on those who sell them. Technology providers come to understand what their own product does to the people who use it.
The centre certifies no one and validates no product. Neutrality is what makes the room worth entering, and the university guarantees it.
Digital is not immaterial. It is invisible.