We
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).
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Virtual Colloquium: Responding To Crisis
On September 21st the UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres addressed the international community with regards to climate change and surging inequalities – he warns that “we are on the edge of an abyss”.
In the face of continuous crisis, we need to develop appropriate measures that identify the manifold roots and mitigate the effects of climate change. Effects that are no future possibility but which we are already experiencing today.
How do we respond to the multifaceted impacts of climate change – and how can we push back politically, artistically, and through design and activism? After all, climate change has long since evolved from “just” an ecological problem into a complex social, geopolitical, economical, and fundamentally cultural issue.
For our colloquium we invite perspectives of various actors from different parts of the world in order to better understand the full scope of sustainable transformations of our societies, while considering quite different approaches, affordances as well as social and cultural implications. Together we want to reflect on our role as students, teachers, scholars and as the university as a potential space.
Schedule
21. Oct 2021 | Gesche Joost – Kick-Off
28. Oct 2021 | Joana Moll – The Environmental Impact of Surveillance
4. Nov 2021 | Leo Fidjeland and Linnea Våglund – Nonhuman Nonsense
11. Nov 2021 | Klasse Klima – Climate-Just Design for Institutional Transformation
18. Nov 2021 | Cesy Leonard – Legal Stress
25. Nov 2021 | Rosaria Taddeo – Ethical Governance for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence
2. Dec 2021 | Daniel Irrgang – Critical Zones Study Group. Preparing a Thought Exhibition with Bruno Latour
9. Dec 2021 | Lilly Gothe – Transforming Universities Bottom-Up: Students as Change Agents for Sustainability
16. Dec 2021 | Maike Gebker & Anna Eckl – Artificial Nature
23. Dec 2021 & 06. Jan 2022 | winter break
13. Jan 2022 | Gitanjali Wolf – A Socio-Ecological Transformation Goes Hand in Hand with the Future of Work
20. Jan 2022 | Iva Čukić – Searching for the Just City – Practices and Visions
27. Jan 2022 | Pauline Zapke & Hanna BeckerBorder – Violence and Resistance along the Balkanroute
3. Feb 2022 | Corinna Canali – The objectionable within the objectionable. Normative censorship of gender and sexual expression in online content moderation
10. Feb 2022 | Mona Sloane – *This Is Not A Drill*: Technology, Equity, and the Climate Emergency [afternoon session @ 3pm]
17. Feb 2022 | Gesche Joost – Closing Session
To register for the Colloquium, please fill out this form.