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).
In this week’s session of the Virtual Colloquium we will have Felix Kosok as our guest.
Felix’ Talk is titled “An Outrageous Spectacle On the Politics of Style in Design“
Design is seen by many as mere husk, the sugar coating on the pill. This might be the reason, why so many designers that still uphold the ideals of modernity are sceptical towards aesthetics in design, especially those that smell like youth culture and trends. Style in design is even accused of being morally wrong, a crime against the order of things. Against this backdrop my research focuses on the latent political potentials of style in design in regards to identity politics. Through these political negotiations, which take place on the visible surface of things and bodies, a political dimension of design opens up aesthetically, which also affects issues such as sustainability and designed structures of power.
Felix Kosok is a design researcher and graphic designer. He completed his doctorate in 2020 at the HfG Offenbach on the aesthetic-political dimension of design. In addition to his research, he is himself active as a designer in the design collaboration Bureau069. Since 2021, Felix Kosok has been Professor for Graphic Design and Design Theory at the German International University (GIU) Berlin.
For the speakers list of this semester and for information on registration, please have a look here.