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).
Visitor participation and enhancement of public engagement with science at the Museum für Naturkunde („Besucherpartizipation im Museum für Naturkunde Berlin“) develops participatory processes and tools that involve different social communities into scientific processes and discourses. The participatory tools are meant to enable visitors to inform themselves about research at the museum and also bring their own knowledge, thoughts and ideas to it.
The aim of this project is to create guidelines and recommendations obtained by the experiences during this project for the design of participatory processes with specialists and nonspecialists at scientific institutions, and the use of participatory elements in public space. The project is also an important preliminary to the planned rearrangement of exhibition halls and education facilities at the Museum für Naturkunde as well as to further research of participatory projects in scientific processes and discourses.
The Museum of Natural History Berlin – Leibniz Institute for Evolutionary and Biodiversity Research is one of the eight research museums of the Leibniz Association. It is one of the world’s most important research institutions in the field of biological and geoscientific evolutionary and biodiversity research.