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).
Book Presentation & Discussion
16.06.2026, 19:00
Do you read me?!
Auguststraße 28
10117 Berlin
We live in times of comprehensive datafication. Digital technologies allow ever more aspects of our lives and the planet to be measured and analyzed. This creates new ways of knowing and doing. All too often however, this development leads to a systematic devaluation of forms of knowing that cannot be quantified and processed digitally. Digital data and lived worlds, technical measurements and embodied experiences are based on fundamentally different ways of perceiving the world. This publication addresses the relationship between quantifiable and experiential knowledge and uses three transdisciplinary dialogues between the arts and sciences to ask how these differences can be articulated and made productive. Contributions to the book by Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou, Florian Conradi, Michelle Christensen, Johannes Fritz, Ulrich Ott, Anani Dodji Sanouvi, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder. More about the book here
The editors of the publication Michelle Christensen, Florian Conradi, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder will present and discuss their attempts to make productive the ambiguities of knowing based on collaborative practices and dis/embodied experience. Shintaro Miyazaki will comment on the publication from his critical perspective on digital media theory and practice.
Parts of the research was conducted in the framework of the project Latent Spaces. Performing Ambiguous Data, the research group Design, Diversity and New Commons at the Berlin University of the Arts/Weizenbaum Institute, and the chair for Open Science/Critical Culture at the Technische Universität Berlin/Einstein Center Digital Future.