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).
We are looking forward to having Iva Čukić as our guest in the Colloquium on Thursday, January 20th.
Iva is the founder of Ministarstvo prostora (Collective Ministry of Space) and will be talking about the experience with the democratization of urban planning in Belgrade. The talk is titled “Searching for the Just City – Practices and Visions“.
This presentation will give an overview of the participation processes in Belgrade, with an emphasis on the endeavors and experiences of the collective Ministry of Space which intensively works towards raising awareness on the citizens’ participation in urban planning and in close collaboration with the local initiatives. Therefore, the focus will be on the democratization of urban planning, and on how we can improve it, taking into account the development examples around us, political and economic context, citizens’ struggles and urgency to build a just city.
For the speaker’s list of this semester and information on registration, please have a look here.