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 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.
Digital Sovereignty
Social Design
The key horizontal priority of the “Change Agents” project is “Inclusion and diversity in all fields of education”. A cooperation with: Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) (Lead), EKA Estonia, Unibz Italy, Elisava Spain, Shenkar Israel.
Studio Class: Politics of Machines / Michelle Christensen & Florian Conradi
Teaching
26 Oct 2021 – 15 Feb 2022
In a state of ‘ontological crisis’, all boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, and the organic and inorganic have been severely blurred. These are times of curious contrivances, novel natures, inescapable automation and posthuman performances – where human and nonhuman find themselves being entwined, meshed and muddled into new unwitting entanglements. But from biased machine-learning to surveillance capitalism and digital colonisation – what power-structures are implicitly and covertly being embedded into these technologies? When are we still at the centre of the social algorithm, and when do we become extensions of the extensions that we built? Do we have to raise a discussion about political systems of things – about ‘ubiquitous capitalism’, ‘algorithmic aristocracy’ or ‘object-mediated democracy’?
In this studio class we will discuss ethical, social and political implications of technology with a focus on ‘automation’ versus ‘autonomy’. We will practice and formulate critical perspectives on the politics of machines, discovering novel phenomena and shadowing the material regimes of power that we ourselves live within – hindering and compromising personal devices and thus conducts, in order to uncover latent power structures embedded in everyday life. Furthermore, drawing on the approaches of research-through-design and critical making, we will prototype possibilities and provocations, integrating critical thinking and designing.
TU Berlin / Free Elective / English / 6 ECTS / Max. 15 participants / Room: tbd
Dates: Tuesdays 10:00 – 13:30 Introduction: 26.10.2021 at 10:00
Registration: Please register beforehand to: and
Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi share a visiting professorship for Open Science (Critical Design / Critical Culture) 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.
