04/11/2025
🌍 Technology Justice – Building a Fairer Technological Future
How can we ensure that access to technology is not a privilege for a few, but a right for all?
Mohammed Omer, Doctoral Candidate at the New Production Institute at Helmut-Schmidt-University, is dedicating his research to exactly this question.
His focus: Technology Justice – equitable access to the tools and knowledge that enable production and innovation.
Mohammed’s work empowers communities to build, adapt, and own the technologies they use – paving the way toward technological sovereignty.
⚙️ Technology Justice in Manufacturing
Manufacturing is vital for sustainable development. Advances in manufacturing have powerful spillover effects across multiple industries — driving innovation, job creation, and resilience.
However, the means to advanced manufacturing are not equally distributed. Mohammed’s research directly addresses this imbalance, exploring how open and inclusive manufacturing systems can unlock opportunities for communities worldwide.
As coordinator of pioneering open-source initiatives such as the Open Lab Starter Kit (, github.com/Open-Lab-Starter-Kit) and the Open-Source Metal 3D Printer Project, he bridges research, design, and implementation to democratize access to production technologies worldwide.
Through participatory action research, co-design, and distributed manufacturing, Mohammed explores how open-source industrial machines can foster sustainable industrialisation in low-resource contexts.
Beyond his research in Hamburg, Mohammed is a Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) Fellow at the Yale Global Justice Program (), a Visiting Researcher at the ’s Judge Business School, and a University Innovation Fellow at d.school.
💡 His journey exemplifies a new generation of researchers who see technology not only as a driver of progress – but as a tool for justice, participation, and self-determination.
