We
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).
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ConText
The aim of ConText is to develop a user-friendly and intuitive system of smart textile surfaces that make walls and floors in living areas usable for IOT applications. The low-energy cable-based power supply and communication infrastructure is safe, environmentally friendly and has a low electromagnetivity. The flexible design allows intuitive and individual configuration of smart homes. Actuators and sensors can simply be placed based on the needs and requests of the users. Various haptic interaction patterns such as touching, stroking or stretching can be used to configure interactions, thus forming a basis for intelligent interactive assistants. In addition to spontaneous configurations, settings can also be personalized and activated by preset patches. ConText enables the connection to standard smart home protocols.
Photo credits: Katrin Greiner
