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 by prof. dr. Caitlin Fisher on this Thursday, Jan 15, 2026 for a presentation titled “Art and narrative as world-changing: Stories as Epistemological Infrastructure” as part of the Virtual Colloquium sessions at the Berlin University of the Arts. Art and storytelling produce knowledge that other methods cannot, making invisible systems visible, alternative futures thinkable, and transformation possible. Through projects spanning hypertext fiction, augmented reality installations, and virtual reality worlds, this artist talk traces a journey from Canada’s first born-digital dissertation to policy tables at the WHO to interdisciplinary work on energy transition, exploring how art doesn’t just warn about crisis – it also creates epistemological infrastructure: the cognitive scaffolding we need to imagine and enact transformation.
Caitlin Fisher is Director of the Immersive Storytelling Lab and the Augmented Reality Lab at York University, Toronto, where she is also Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Arts. Her award-winning work spans electronic literature, augmented reality poetry, XR installations, and VR worlds and her current projects address art in the service of tackling antimicrobial resistance and co-creating Indigenous futures. A former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair, she has been invited to bring her storytelling practices to contexts ranging from the WHO World Health Assembly to energy transition policy convenings to the Bellagio Center. She serves as immediate past President of the Electronic Literature Organization and on the international board of HASTAC. She is also an affiliated professor with the Centre for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Centre of Excellence, at the University of Bergen.
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