»Digitale Transformation of Workspaces« Interview Christiane Berth

Interview, camera & editing: Lennart Vincent Schmidt

How have digital technologies transformed our working environments since the 1970s? And what do office spaces reveal about power relations, gender dynamics, and global transformations? In conversation with Christine Berth, we discuss the history of technology, office work, and new perspectives on the social dimensions of digital transformation.

In the summer of 2025, Christine Berth from the University of Graz was a Summer Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam. As part of the Digital Inequalities project, we spoke with her about the history of technology, office work, and the social dimensions of digital transformation.

In her current research project Digital Transformation of Workplaces: Power, Gender Relations, and Communication in the Office, Christine Berth examines how digital technologies have reshaped communication and gender relations in office environments since the late 1970s. She shows that the modern office was not only a site of everyday technological appropriation but also a key arena of global labor relations — from the typewriter to the laptop, from the open-plan office to mobile work.

The conversation highlights how technological innovation has transformed work practices, hierarchies, and social structures — and how the history of digital office work opens up new perspectives on the history of technology and computing.

In the interview, Christine Berth refers to this television program from the SRF archives, which offers a striking contemporary perspective on the digitization of office work. The 1985 broadcast Kafi Stift discusses how computers were transforming everyday office life — featuring insights from a work psychologist and future visions presented by commercial apprentices. The program ranges from questions of control and automation to the role of electronic music, and even includes playful scenes imagining the future of home office work in the year 2000.

The source illustrates how closely future visions, social expectations, and technological developments were already intertwined in the 1980s — and thus provides an important historical context for Berth’s research on the digital transformation of workplaces.