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The Graduate School „Topology of Technology“ at Darmstadt University of Technology organizes an international conference on the spatial dimensions of past and current technologies. Technology obviously bears an impact on existing spatial setups and intervenes in space constitutions of various kinds. Technology and space relate to each other in highly technified arenas, e.g. in laboratories, households, studios, vehicles, urban areas. In addition, technology generates novel spaces in the first place, e.g. cyberspace and built environments. The work of the Graduate School as well as the conference in autumn 2008 aim at developing contributions to a topology of technology based on the twofold assumption that technology essentially shapes spatial arrangements and creates conditions which even influence sensory perception and bodily experience.

In turn, these truly human factors contribute to the ways in which technologies are spatially constructed. Technical development is therefore an ideal testbed for the investigation of socio-spatial problems and the strategies of coping with these. Interdisciplinary research can address the issue of a technology-shaped and –endowed society in such a way that the importance of spatial aspects, undeniable as it is in times of globalization, increasing surveillance, networking and the instantaneous exchange of pictures by mobile phone, clearly comes to bear.