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).
An expected rise of people in need of health care – in part due to demographic change and an aging society – results in numerous challenges within the health care sector. One approach to meet these challenges will be the increased use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) as part of health care environments for the elderly. Rather than being driven solely by technology, the research project CLOSER proposes a user-centered approach which is assisted by technology and explores the need for tactile communication in health care environments.
From this starting point, CLOSER seeks to explore new applications for health care and therapeutic treatment, which play on the symbiotic relationship between physical computing and the sense of touch.
CLOSER overcomes conventional interfaces, investigates the meaning of interpersonal touch and experiments with forms of tactile communication in health care. Application scenarios are explored in order to examine the functionality and potential of skin as a means of embodied interaction in health care.