The Design Research Lab is a laboratory for experimental design and research reflecting on the digital society. Through playful interventions, critical making and collaborative reasoning we investigate possible futures. As a platform and network, we are deeply involved with the requirements and policies needed for an inclusive and sustainable development of the digital society from a design perspective.
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).
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?