Within the framework of this year’s “European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW 2011)“ in Aarhus, Denmark, the EUSSET-IISI Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Ms. Prof. Dr. Christiane Floyd, emeritus professor at the University of Hamburg.

Background: regardless of whether at the workplace or in leisure time, IT artifacts interpenetrate and change nearly every aspects of our life. The field of informatics as scientific discipline deals with the design of IT artifacts. Traditionally, informatics was rather been understood as an entirely formal and technique related science. Now, it has to meet the challenge to understand design in an interaction between technique and organization. A new research and design paradigm has to be developed which adequately addresses the social embedding of IT artifacts.

The EUSSET-IISI Lifetime Achievement Award is given to scientist for outstanding contributions concerning the reorientation of informatics referring the design of social embedded systems. This award appreciates the lifework of scientists, is presented by an international jury and is the highest endowed award in the world of socio-informatics with a prize money of 5,000 €uros. The winners of the award become an honorary member of EUSSET - The European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies.

As Prof. Dr. Volker Wulf, University of Siegen and International Institute for Socio-Informatics (IISI), Bonn, clarified in his laudation in the plenum of the ECSCW meeting, Christiane Floyed received the EUSSET-IISI Lifetime Achievement Award especially for the following merits:

• Development of an alternative research paradigm in the field of software engineering which has opened the thitherto dominantly limited to technological questions discourse for socio-informatic questions
• Inclusion of cybernetics as a second order (self-organization theory) in theorizing of informatics
• Engagement concerning the development of international course offerings and PhD programs in socio-informatics, especially of the international Woman’s University and a PhD program at the University of Addis Abeba.
• Long lasting political engagement for a user-friendly design of the information society, especially in the forum ‘Computer Scientists for Peace and Social Responsibility’ (FIfF).

Born 1943 in Vienna, Christiane Floyd started her mathematic studies at the University of Vienna in 1961 and received the doctor’s degree in 1966. In 1968, she worked as scientific assistant at the Stanford University alongside the development of an Algol-60-Compiler for the Siemens Central Laboratory in Munich. Later, she became leader of the field ‘method development‘ at Softlab in Munich. In 1975 she presented the first worldwide development environment called Maestro I at the Siemens trade fair. As the first woman in the German-speaking area, she began her career as professor at the Faculty of Informatics at the TU Berlin in 1978. In 1991, the University of Hamburg called – and she started to lead the field of software technology (SWT) at the Faculty of Informatics. <br/>One of the essential achievements of her work was the STEPS process model understanding software development as an evolutionary activity which involves user in the design process. Concerning the conceptual foundation of such a social embedded understanding of software engineering, Floyd reverted to the theory of self-organized systems.