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.
Bodies have always been in a constant state of material and discursive transition. From medical to DIY body augmentation, from meticulous self-tracking to life-mining mass-quantification of (bio)data, and from intimate lived reality to mythical metaphor, the body currently exists as a hyper-connected site of contestation and power plays. It can be understood as something that gets updated, altered, needs maintenance and sometimes breaks down and gets rebooted. As something that is not fixed, something collective and transforming, always in flux – as a site of negotiation.
Donna Haraway’s well-known feminist allegory of the ‘cyborg’ from 1985 already inserted an oppositional consciousness at the heart of the debate on new technological bodies and societies, questioning power relations and the making of ethical and political resistance in the age of an informatics of domination. In the ambiguity of the natural and artificial, self-developing and externally designed, Haraway proposes the potential of strategically confusing identities. We are all chimeras, she argued, fabricated hybrids of machine and organism – and should take pleasure in the confusion of boundaries.
In this block-seminar we will discover and debate the topic of performing bodies as a site of confusion, negotiation and of critique. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective on the politics and technologies of bodies in transit with a focus on ‘automation’ versus ‘autonomy’, we will discover real-world phenomena and engage personally with the technological systems in which we are embedded and embodied. Drawing on approaches of critical making and designing, as well as feminist and queer theory – we will (ad hoc) prototype concepts for performing bodies differently.
UdK Berlin + TU Berlin / English / 2 SWS UdK students can gain credits for this class in the framework of the Module ‘Designmethoden’ or over the Studium Generale.
Registration: Please register beforehand to:
Participants: Max. 10
*Format: This class will take place virtually, but depending on pandemic regulations, we hope to have the chance to meet for prototyping.
Lecturers: Prof. Dr. Michelle Christensen, Prof. Dr. Florian Conradi
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.
