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 Ines Weigand as our guest. Ines’ talk is titled “Multi-species interdependence through design: Integrating body materials and cycles into the design process”.
As the environmental crisis deepens, it becomes increasingly urgent to rethink the relationship between humans and their environment. In this talk, Ines Weigand will discuss how our interdependence with other species can be practiced through design, linking body and planetary health and integrating body materials and cycles into the design process.
Ines Weigand graduated in 2020 from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) with a Master’s degree in Communication in Social and Economic Contexts. In her collaborative Master’s thesis, she investigated potentials of the Open Science movement for a change in the relationship between humans and nature. In order to investigate this problem, which is typical for the Anthropocene, she used methods of critical making and experiential learning.
After gaining experience in (knowledge) transfer and participatory urban development for two years at the University of the Arts and the public innovation lab CityLAB Berlin, she returned to the University of the Arts in October 2022. Here, she conducts research in the project “Design, Diversity and New Commons”, at the UdK Berlin / Weizenbaum Institute.
Ines Weigand builds bridges between science, society and politics and benefits from her interdisciplinary background and pragmatic attitude. She is interested in alternative learning environments, new forms of knowledge production and concepts of sustainability that lead to a socio-ecological transformation.
For the speakers list of this semester and for information on registration, please have a look here.