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).
UdK-Bezalel:
In June, our partners from the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design Jerusalem visited us in Berlin, where we had several workshops, a rich program and a Long Table Event. There where project presentations, discussions about the insights we gathered trough the ongoing cooperation, and workshops on concepts of Living Lab – with a great input from Denis Weil, Illinois Institute for Technology/Chicago.
At the Long Table, guests from different fields (ethnology, urban planning, sociology, architecture and development) came to the informal discussion and shared their insights about working on a community-based level. We than discussed possible tendencies for the Living Lab approach.
Many thanks to our guests Jesko Fezer/HBK Hamburg, Birgit Cleuvers/fibs, Kathleen Ziemann/betterplace lab, Matthias Held/HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, Manuela Bojadzijev/IEE HU, Denis Weil/IIT Chicago, Jens Adam/IEE HU, our partners Michal Eitan, Sarah Auslander and David Spectre and all student participants and helpers.
The aim of the events was to focus on a concept of Living Lab that we integrate in our research work. The events are part of our bilateral project “Community Now?”.