Great honour for the DDLitLab: Three Fellows receive teaching award for ‘Innovation by Legal Design Thinking’

8 May 2025

Photo: UHH / Bartels

On 6 May 2025, the new University of Hamburg Teaching Award was presented in the atrium of the State and University Library as part of the Hauptsache Lehre! event - a strong sign of the appreciation of excellent and innovative teaching at UHH.

We are particularly pleased that three DDLitLab fellows were honoured as a teaching team with the award in the category ‘Courageous and cross-border teaching’: Anton Sefkow, Marten Borchers and Lukas Musumeci.

The teaching project they developed, ‘Innovation by Legal Design Thinking’ (IbLDT; also known as ‘StudDigiLab - Student Digitalisation Lab’), was awarded funding in all three funding rounds of the Digital and Data Literacy in Teaching Labs (DDLitLab), most recently as a Cross-Disciplinary Teaching Lab (CDTL).

Thanks to its innovative, practice-orientated and interdisciplinary approach, the project has achieved significant results that have had a lasting impact on students' skills and teaching methodology. The focus was on developing digital prototypes for real-life challenges in social enterprises, enabling students to acquire specialised knowledge and practical technology skills. A key outcome is the promotion of data literacy among students, who learn to analyse problems based on data and make decisions - an indispensable skill in today's data world. In addition, interdisciplinary skills were strengthened through collaboration with social enterprises and the integration of different specialist perspectives. This enabled students to think beyond their area of specialisation and look at problems from different angles, which is increasingly important in the modern working world.

The DDLitLab team would like to congratulate our three fellows on this honour. We see this honour as a success of our project measures for the transformation of studying and teaching at the University of Hamburg.

The award winners in their own words:

"We are extremely pleased to have been honoured with the Teaching Award and would like to thank the University of Hamburg for this special recognition of our joint teaching work. For us as a team, the award is a great motivation and confirmation of our commitment to innovative, participative and research-orientated teaching. We would particularly like to emphasise the support of the Digital and Data Literacy Lab (DDLitLab), which enables us to implement innovative teaching concepts in the seminar and inspire students. The award-winning event also showed us how valuable an interdisciplinary and application-orientated approach is for learning success. For us, the award is an incentive to continuously develop our teaching and break new ground - especially with regard to promoting digital and data-related skills. We would like to use our experiences and impulses from the seminar to continue working together with students and colleagues on a sustainable and lively teaching and learning culture at the University of Hamburg. Thank you very much for your trust and appreciation!"

^UHH/Bartels

The University of Hamburg Teaching Prize was awarded for the first time this year and is endowed with €2000. The award ceremony was framed by speeches from prominent guests, including University President Prof Dr Hauke Heekeren, Science Senator Katharina Fegebank and Vice President for Studies and Teaching Prof Dr Natalia Filatkina.

Prof. Dr Kai-Uwe Schnapp, Scientific Director of the DDLitLab, was also honoured for his commitment - like our Fellow Dr Lennart Wittkuhn, he was on the shortlist for this year's teaching award.