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).
The aim of the project is to promote an experimental landscape for active participation processes and to support neighborhoods and bottom-up initiatives in dealing with digitalization.
Initiatives situated in North Rhine-Westphalia were called upon to apply to participate in the project – 12 were selected in the end and have now, since October 2016, participated in the ongoing model project to support the neighborhood development team with digitization. We evaluate and help implementing the respective goals of the individual neighborhood initiatives involved and do so with tailored tools, communication instruments, platforms and participatory methods – to develop these (further) in an iterative process and to accompany the initiatives with scientific study.