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 humans, we use body language mostly without explicit notice. It may therefore provide a helpful means to make our interaction with technology more natural, and more subtle.
In this project, we investigate devices that have body language, and how this body language can be designed. The current prototype reacts differently to different users and situations, varying across different spaces around the device. Its behaviour ranges from shy to curious.