On the Need for Individual Sustainability in Digital Technology: Positioning Human Factors as Core Software Quality Attributes for Long-Term Sustainability

As digitalization accelerates at a rapid pace, software-intensive systems—e.g., AI—elevate stress, anxiety and self-doubt, raising concerns about long-term sustainability of digital systems. Yet, most frameworks that meant to harmonize digitalization with sustainability overlook human factors. This thesis argues that sustainable digitalization requires moving beyond the environmental and technical dimensions of sustainability and requires attention to social and individual dimensions—i.e., the human factors—to preserve human values and well-being over time. My multivocal literature review provides evidence of such shortcoming specifically within the context of Twin Transition—a governance framework defined in the European Green Deal. To demonstrate the problem of such a shortcoming, I designed and executed an experiment with 30 human participants in which I show that neglecting social and individual human factors in digital systems may lead to reduced self-confidence and self-efficacy. My findings underscore the need for more pronounced efforts in social and individual sustainability in digitalization, and urge organizations to rethink current adoption and deployment strategies of advanced digital technology to avoid adverse effects on individuals. I conclude this thesis with a discussion of the results and recommended research directions for the software engineering community.

Department dc:contributor.department

Engineering

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Baran Shajari

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David, Istvan

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.71548/4

OAI record oai:identifier

https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Amacsphere.mcmaster.ca%3A11375%2F33140