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).
What is meaningful change? What does collaboration mean and how can we work towards more inclusive and just futures? The podcast critically discusses aspects that arise in social design, i.e. power asymmetries, temporalities, safe grounds for co-learning and new understandings of knowledge and knowledge production.
Digital Sovereignty
Social Design
The LaLaMo project aims to explore if LLM capabilities built with humans-in-the-loop perform better than those without.
Digital Studies
Development of an augmented reality (AR) model and application visualizing an animated interpreter for German sign language (DGS)
Material Interactions
Social Design
Data Physicalization as a Design Tool for Science Communication
Material Interactions
Social Design
The Ecological Self: Integrating Body Materials and Cycles into the Design Process
Material Interactions
Critical Making + Designing
Digital Sovereignty
Gender Studies
Material Interactions
Objecting the Objectionable: Normative Obscenification of Gender and Sexuality in Digital Governance
Digital Studies
Gender Studies
Visual Cultures
The SocialWear
research project aims to combine the approaches of traditional wearable computing and high-tech fashion. Traditional wearable computing primarily uses clothing for sensor integration and computation, often neglecting design purposes. In contrast, high-tech fashion integrates simple digital functions into complex designs. SocialWear seeks to develop a new generation of clothing that encompasses both sophisticated artificial intelligence and thoughtful design. This requires seamless integration of fashion and electronic design to create garments that can recognize and respond to complex social environments.
Material Interactions
In Conversation
Digital Sovereignty
Social Design
How could knowledge on climate change reach communities that are disconnected from the global knowledge community? Minodu aims to co-create an accessible and participatory format of scientific communication in the context of sustainable land management in the rural region of Kara in Togo. The word "Minodu" comes from Ewe, a language spoken in southern Togo, and translates as "let's be together" or "let's work together". Along these lines, the methodologies and technologies are to be developed collaboratively.
Compact Course: Social Design in Practice – Working with the Sustainable Development Goals
Teaching
4 Oct 2021 – 8 Oct 2021
Designers, artists and activists can play a vital role in shaping sustainable futures. But what are our means and methods in doing so? In this course we will take a closer look at the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – a set of 17 interconnected global goals agreed upon in the United Nation General Assembly in 2015. Their mission statement is to be „a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all people and the world by 2030“. While critics point out that the yearly cost it would take to achieve them would be too high, supporters put forward that the SDGs were drafted in a process including countries of the global south taking into account the complex structure of global poverty.
In times of overlapping crises, we want reflect upon these overarching goals and how we as designers can work with and relate to them: What are the assumptions and the systemic basis on which they were drafted upon? How can we contribute? And how does the concept of social design come into play here?
In this block-seminar we will critically evaluate the Sustainable Development Goals and discuss them together with other perspectives on digitalisation, sustainability and intersectionality. From this base we will move to the more practical realms of social and human centered design and look at design methods to work with the concept of the Sustainable Development Goals in a hands-on way.
UdK Berlin + TU Berlin / 2 SWS / 3 CP / UdK students can gain credits for this class in the framework of the module „Designmethoden“ or over the Studium Generale.
This course will take place virtually but depending on pandemic regulations, we hope to have the chance to meet for prototyping.
Lecturers: Emilia Knabe (Design Research Lab), Ben Siegler (Design Research Lab)
Dates: 4-8 October 2021
Registration: Please register by 15. September 2021 with your name, field of study and matriculation number to Ben Siegler (). Max. number of participants: 16.
