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).
What is meaningful change? What does collaboration mean and how can we work towards more inclusive and just futures? This podcast delves into key issues of collaborative practices that emerge from the fieldwork during collaborations between design focused academia and NGOs/non-profit organisations.
We focus on collaborations between institutions, students, collectives, NGOs, and movements that aim to initiate, support, or create space for eco-social transformation. Each episode is an invitation to see collaborative social design practices in a new light – together with practitioners, activists, and academics. The podcast critically discusses aspects that arise in social design, i.e. power asymmetries, temporalities, safe grounds for co-learning and new understandings of knowledge and knowledge production.
In this first episode, we explore our perspectives on collaboration and delve into the broader context of the podcast. We introduce the “Change Agents” project and the Social Design Network, and highlight the themes of the next episodes and questions that are relevant for the series.
Change Agents is a project co-funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ program.