This issue of BUW.OUTPUT brings together articles that deal with different aspects of the topic of "transition and change" and which, in a small selection, also reflect the diversity of the specialist disciplines gathered at the Bergische Universität. At the beginning, what shook us last summer and will probably happen to an increasing extent in times of climate change is examined from an engineering perspective, but which is currently threatening to be overlooked again: the phenomenon of flooding, together with its prerequisites and consequences.

How should and can one build in the future and make urban living as sustainable as possible? A team from the Building Physics department of the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering has succeeded in bringing the world's most important university building competition, the Solar Decathlon Europe (SDE), to Germany and the transformation city of Wuppertal for the first time. A second article presents exactly what awaits us on the Nordbahntrasse in the near future.

The true wealth of the future is no longer gold or oil, but data. How these can be used for the common good in such a way that people’s privacy is preserved while at the same time increasing the number of users is discussed in a contribution from the field of cryptography in a new, information technology-oriented form.

Looking at what is to come has always occupied people's imaginations. A contribution from the point of view of literary and cultural studies provides insightful insights into past and present narratives of the future in film and literature. A further, historiographically accentuated contribution applies to the meaning and perspective of what cultures regard as a "catastrophe" in order to then readjust the "human-environment structure" in each case.

In addition to news from the world of research, the current issue also offers a portrait of the "Wuppertal Center for Smart Materials & Systems" (CM@S).

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OUTPUT authors in conversation

On the Bergische Universität YouTube channel, the authors tell more about themselves and their research areas, and why they enjoy what they do.

• Prof. Dr. Andreas Schlenkhoff: Floods - protection and precaution in times of climate change
• Prof. Dr. Tibor Jager and David Niehues: Driving digitization with new technologies in data processing
• Jun.-Prof. Dr. Cécile Stehrenberger and Tomás Usón: When times change - catastrophes and their meaning