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).
‘Critical Maker Culture’ is an interdisciplinary research group at the UdK Berlin / Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. Hosting researchers with backgrounds in design, art, gender and sociology, the group takes a practice-based design research approach to investigating the potential of ‘critical making’.
A potentially new path to strengthening social self-determination is currently emerging through hacker- and maker communities, in which citizens participate directly in the development and production of new technical artefacts. These movements operate as decentralised networks of producers who engage into a ‘glocal’ development of new systems and artefacts through digital production possibilities such as open-source code and rapid prototyping. In many cases, the production takes place in a meshwork of informal and temporary labs that operate as open eco-systems of actors and resources.
This democratisation of technology in a globally connected open-source network makes evident an increasing decentralisation of power structures and production, making possible the experimentation with new forms of collaboration – but under what conditions can this democratic potential unfold, and democracy for who? A central question of the research group is therefore in which way open lab structures in their diverse forms can provide an access to technologies on a base of diversity and inclusion.
With a focus on the three topic-areas of gender, sustainability and the non-western perspectives, the research group explores in which forms the democratisation of technology can help to achieve a greater accessibility and multiplicity. These questions are empirically examined and put into an international dialogue in order to locate overarching tendencies and challenges, and the practice-based methods of critical making and designing are employed to create own design experiments and interventions as contributions to the discourse.