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).
The past couple of months might suggest: almost anything can be done ‘remotely’: studying, drinking coffee, hosting dinners, watching theatre plays and, of course, working. Yet even in a well connected ‚global village’ the term remote signals what many –regardless of demographic density– might feel: great distance, solitude, even a certain loneliness. ‚Remote regions’ are somewhere in the middle of nowhere, ‘remote islands’ is said of solitary islands in the ocean. While ‘remoteness’ is one way to define a lack of intimacy across a physical distance, the notion of intimacy applies on many scales and levels as a space where the private and public, the social, cultural and political meet (Søndergaard 2018).
In this workshop, we will be exploring the theme of Intimate Tech. Taking reflections on our recent personal and collective experiences of isolation, personal health and healing, remoteness and an uncertainty about the future of “togetherness”, we will ask ourselves how we can build technology that better serves our emotional, physical and even spiritual needs.
We will collectively question and define the significance of Intimacy in the field of Human-Computer Interaction by choosing a context where we recognise a need for (or lack of) intimacy, whether that is between two people, between a person and their own body, between the individual and the space they inhabit, or between people and nonhuman objects. We will then design and prototype a product or experience that responds to your chosen context, seeking to provoke a conversation around intimacy and how we might engage with the subject through an implementation of technology.
Lecturers: Marie Dietze and Alice Stewart