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).
We are joined on Thursday, 03.07. at 9 am by Maya Indira Ganesh for a presentation titled “AI goes pop: AI’s culture and the culture of AI” as part of the Virtual Colloquium at the UdK. AI culture is now popular culture. Misinformation and large scale manipulation are not just about safety and risks to society, but also about how aesthetics and visual culture are changing through the mass adoption of a new technology. This talk explores the materiality and temporality of AI in and as contemporary mass digital culture.
Dr. Maya Indira Ganesh is Associate director (Research partnerships) and Assistant Research Professor at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. From 2021-2024, she was an Assistant Teaching Professor at the university, hired to co-develop and direct a new master’s program in AI, Ethics & Society. Her current research relates to the public and social adoption of AI by marginal and expert publics alike. Prior to academic work, Maya was a researcher working with civil society organisations in India, SE Asia, and Europe on gender justice, digital security, and freedom of speech and expression. Maya is also a freelance speaker, curatorial advisor, and essayist specialising in media arts, culture, and technology. Maya has a doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. “Auto-correct: The fantasies and failures of AI, ethics, and the driverless car” is drawn from her doctoral thesis and was published in March 2025 by ArtEZ Press. More about her here: www.lcfi.ac.uk and www.bodyofwork.in.
Please find below the Zoom link to join, which will be the same for all online sessions this semester:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82954605489?pwd=VP3XBDzVogeuQtLWaXbWEFpm9ObxiQ.1
Meeting-ID: 829 5460 5489
Kenncode: 079532