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).
As human beings, we are inherently trained in the perception of life-like signals. It may therefore be worthwhile to investigate such signals as a means of status display for mobile phones, which currently only communicate with us through beeps and vibration bursts.
The common relationship to one’s mobile phone is already a close one. This project exaggerates this circumstance, by proposing a permanently active, yet subtle, tactile impulse as a status display: A calm pulse that represents a status of ‘no missed calls, no missed text messages, and a sufficient niveau of battery and reception’, and, respectively, a excited pulse that issues the phone’s need for attention. The project involves a number of breathing and pulsating prototypes.