The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
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).
In times of terrestrial turmoil – of intersecting social, cultural and environmental crisis, new tactics and concepts are needed to re-envision and re-describe how we want to live in the future. As global urbanization accelerates, informal settlements, not least in cities in the Global South, will be where the majority of new urban dwellers will live. The way in which these dwellings are assembled, knowledge and resources (geopolitically) produced and consumed, will greatly influence the possibilities of transitioning towards global sustainability, addressing urgent issues such as climate change, poverty and resource depletion.
The movement of maker- and hackspaces currently emerging across the globe demonstrate an inclusive Bottom-up approach towards collaborative production, consumption and learning. Embedded in a global community, yet confronting local issues, they employ open knowledge and open source technologies to experiment with and probe out alternative perspectives, positions and practices.
In dialogue with a series of critical makerspaces from e.g. Ghana, Togo, Jordan, Colombia and Indonesia, and in close collaboration with MA students from architecture and urban planning at the TU Berlin, this inter- and transdisciplinary studio class will reflect on the relationships between power and participation, technology and accessibility, digital and physical commons. How might these communities incite modes of sustainable urban transformation, forming critical cultures that foster counter tactics and practices, in order to envision and prototype alternative urban futures?
The course will take place as a collaboration with Prof. Dr. Philipp Misselwitz and Dr. Moritz Ahlert from Habitat Unit (International Urbanism and Design, TU Berlin).
TU Berlin / Free Elective / English
Dates: Fridays 10:00 – 17:00 / Introduction: 06.11.2020 at 10:00 via Zoom. Please notice, we will meet on Zoom on Fridays at 10:00, and you will then have the afternoon to work on your projects.
Registration: Please register beforehand to: and
Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi share a visiting professorship for Open Science at the Technische Universität Berlin / Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF), as well as co-heading the research group ‘Critical Maker Culture’ at the UdK Berlin / Weizenbaum Institute. Combining their backgrounds in political-, conflict-, gender-sociology and design in the form of critical practice, writing and teaching, they attempt to formulate the spaces in between these realms. Their work is an endeavour in to exploring the politics of design, material-sociology and practice-based theory.