We
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).
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Arcintex ETN
Berlin University of Arts is part of the Arcintex European Training Network, an EU-funded project for the education of PhD students on design for sustainable ways of living in the domains of architecture, interaction design and textiles. Design Research Lab hosts one of fifteen early stage researchers in the project, Ramyah Gowrishankar. Ramyah’s thesis deals with electrostatic energy harvesting in textiles on the scale of the interior and how this can be used for envisioning new ways of interacting with electronic textiles: What if we could slowly harvest electricity from electrostatic textile setups like we harvest ripe tomatoes from our balcony garden?