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).
Responding to Crisis. Interventions for Sustainable Futures
Two days on the climate crisis and alternative ways of thinking and acting – and what we can do ourselves. With participants from initiatives for a new understanding of sustainability and coexistence. All students are warmly invited to a two-day event, kicking off the winter semester in the framework of the pre-project for a new Einstein Center Climate Change. With lectures, workshops, performances, and installations we’ll be thinking about how each of us can respond to the multifaceted impacts of climate change, and how we can push back politically, artistically, and through design and activism.
After all, climate change has long evolved from a purely ecological problem into a social, geopolitical, economical, and fundamentally cultural problem. We are dealing with a wicked problem, that is, an issue that has variegated impacts and is influenced by variegated factors. This complexity is all too often met with resignation, fatalism, or cynicism.
Still, there exists a variety of initiatives and projects, such as in political activism, policy-making, civic involvement, education, research, arts, and design, highlighting concrete problems and finding meaningful answers. Responding to Crisis – Interventions for Sustainable Futures brings together participants from these areas and offers students and employees the opportunity to interact with them and to brainstorm their own ideas and projects and discuss them. Further information on the program and registration here.
Date
22. & 23.10.2021
Registration & Program
https://respondingtocrisis.de/
Location
Berlin Open Lab (including the new BOL garden!) University of the Arts Berlin, Einsteinufer 43, 10587 Berlin