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).
“Call My Attention” is an application for immediate Line-of-Sight Signaling on Mobile Phones. The application, which proposes a mobile device function to be used like a remote control, enables ‘buzzing’ of nearby friends to achieve immediate attention.
It is especially helpful for deaf or hard-of-hearing users, but also generally in loud and crowded environments.
It results from the Project “DESIGNABILITIES – Disability-inspired Interaction”. Main goal of this project is to find ways for enhancing Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) and Information-Communication-Technology (ICT) by transferring properties and principles from ‘disability’ context into general contexts of communication.
Therefore we investigate on alternative interaction techniques inspired e.g. by deaf communication or blind navigation.
Further detailled function, shown in the video clip!
Feel free to check out our research blog: www.designabilities.org