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).
Participating institutions: University of Copenhagen (Centre Art as Forum), Berlin University of the Arts (Design Research Lab), Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm (Soma Design), Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts (Eco Social Design), Centres Digital Futures in Berlin and Stockholm, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin.
Since December 2022 researchers in art and design conduct a joint colloquium to discuss their work and to find complementary approaches for interdisciplinary collaboration. The participants combine diverse backgrounds, ranging from artistic research and interventions, to participatory and transformative approaches in various design disciplines, to anthropological inquiries and curatorial experiments.
After colloquium sessions in Stockholm and Berlin, the third installment will take place at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre Art as Forum on June 12/13, 2023. During these two days we will focus on methodologies of practice-based knowledge production in the intersecting fields of art and design. In her recent entry to Artforum (April 2023), Claire Bishop identified(at least) two ways in which artistic research may counter certain limits in traditional academic research: “first, by allowing personal narrative and challenging an objective relationship to truth via fiction and fabulation (a tendency already present in academia via feminism and Black studies); and second, by presenting research in aesthetic forms that exceed the merely informative […].” In our discussions we will consider such epistemic capacities of research-based art – and design –, while expanding our methodological inquiries towards more concrete questions: How do we approach inclusive social practices through the lens of aesthetics, and vice versa? Which epistemic and discursive potential do artifacts, their materiality and agency hold, and how can we work with it? How can we permeate the black boxes of computerized societies by means of subversive techno-aesthetic practices? What kind of new depictions and descriptions could help us realign the “Western” logos towards a sustainable, post-anthropocentric future? How may performative approaches help us to facilitate and foster new notions of care and socio-ecological responsibility?