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).
Post-human Design – a critical reflection of current design positions, the role of the human, non-human agents, infrastructures, and processes.
In this colloquium, we will invite international positions from design, art, activism, and science, to discuss Post-human Design, its abilities and limitations, political dimension, its basic concepts, and practical implications. After the turn to user-centered and participatory design that started in the 1960s in Scandinavia, design concepts and their underlying philosophies have been massively influenced by technological developments like IoT, AI, data analytics, and academic discourses like Actor Network Theory. The “human” as such was de-focused and became an actor in networks just amongst other, non-human ones. What does that mean for our design practices, for our basic understanding of design, and our methods of researching? How do we include aspects of equality, post-western perspectives, accountability and sustainability into post-human design perspectives
For our colloquium we invite perspectives of various actors from different parts of the globe 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.
20.04.2023 | Gesche Joost & Ben Siegler – Kick-Off Session |
27.04.2023 | Daniel Irrgang – Thought Exhibition. On Critical Zones, Cosmograms, and the Impossible Outside |
04.05.2023 | Ben Siegler – Post-Human Design – A Digital Scavenger Hunt |
11.05.2023 | Sven Quadflieg – Empty Spaces |
17.05.2023 | No Session (Public Holiday) |
25.05.2023 | Nadia Campo Woytuk – Designing Menstrual Care as a Feminist Posthuman Practice |
01.06.2023 | Debra Shaw – Vitruvian Mantology: Design for Future Bodies |
08.06.2023 | Kathleen Dietzig – Observations from Singapore |
15.06.2023 | Frances Liddell – Designing for Shared Guardianship |
22.06.2023 | Ines Weigand – Multi-species interdependence through design: Integrating body materials and cycles into the design process |
29.06.2023 | Alternative Sessions: Visit to HKW and Humboldt Forum |
06.07.2023 | Johanna Mehl – Cyborg Troubles. Ecological Design and the Technological Fix |
13.07.2023 | Gesche Joost & Ben Siegler – Closing Session |
To register for the Colloquium, please write to