The Design Research Lab is a laboratory for experimental design and research reflecting on the digital society. Through playful interventions, critical making and collaborative reasoning we investigate possible futures. As a platform and network, we are deeply involved with the requirements and policies needed for an inclusive and sustainable development of the digital society from a design perspective.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
The Open Materials symposium displays the outcomes of a day of hands-on workshops – of disassembling electronic waste to discuss lifecycles of electro-active materials, cooking crystals to rethink devices, and debating the informal maker communities that form around environmental sustainability based on a case study of Accra.
Moreover – four invited speakers will present practice-based and ethnographic explorations of ‘prototyping environmental sustainability’ based on approaches of community science, citizen science, biohacking and critical maker culture.
Date/Time
December 4, 2019
17.30-20.00
Program
17:30 Welcome
Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi
17:40 Parcour – Workshop Résumés
The Disassembly Line / Lilo Viehweg
Crystal Urgency / Lisa Hoffmann
Collaborating for Impact / Gameli Adzaho
18:00 Talks
Open Science Communities & Sustainability – Experiences from Accra to Berlin
Gameli Adzaho /
Global Lab / Africa Open Science and Hardware
Prototyping Resilience in Brandenburg
Merle Ibach /
Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Basel
Extinction of a Paradise
Monik Danuwidjaja /
Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Dessau
BioLab
Alessandro Volpato /
Biolab, Top e.V., Berlin
19:00 Get-Together
The Open Materials Symposium is organized by the research group Production Possibilities of the Maker Culture at Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin.