Exploring Engineers’ Lived Experiences of Digital Transformation
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Abstract
Digital transformation in engineering and manufacturing has reshaped how professionals design, operate, and interact with technology, making it one of the most critical shifts in the contemporary industrial landscape. Within this transformation, engineers’ lived experiences particularly their perceptions of identity, autonomy, and collaboration with intelligent systems remain underexplored despite growing recognition of their importance in human–technology relations. However, there is still a clear research problem, namely the lack of empirical understanding of how engineers experience and make meaning of digital transformation beyond technical and efficiency-driven perspectives. Therefore, this study aims to explicitly address this gap by investigating how engineers interpret, negotiate, and internalize digital transformation in their everyday professional practice. Existing studies have primarily emphasized efficiency and system optimization, leaving a gap in understanding how engineers make sense of technological change as a human and existential experience. Here, this study employs a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to examine how engineers interpret and internalize digital transformation within sustainable manufacturing environments. Using semi-structured interviews with twelve professional engineers and interpretative phenomenological analysis, the research identifies five core themes: identity negotiation, emotional adaptation, human–machine collaboration, sustainability reflection, and reconstructed autonomy. These findings reveal that engineers experience digitalization not as a purely technical transition but as a deeply reflective process involving cognitive reorientation, ethical awareness, and emotional transformation. The results contribute to a richer understanding of how meaning is constructed in technologically mediated work and emphasize that adaptation is as much existential as it is procedural. This study broadens theoretical and practical insight into the human dimensions of engineering practice, underscoring the need for human-centered strategies in digital transformation initiatives and offering a conceptual foundation for future interdisciplinary research on lived technological experience.
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