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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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Critical Making + Designing
As an interdisciplinary project existing at the intersection between the UdK Berlin (Weizenbaum Institute) and the TU Berlin (Einstein Center Digital Future), the group hosts researchers with backgrounds in design, art, communication, gender, postcolonialism and sociology, and takes a practice-based design research approach to investigating the potential of critical making and designing.
A potentially new path to strengthening social self-determination is currently emerging through hacker- and maker communities – these movements operate as decentralised networks of producers who engage into a ‘glocal’ development of new systems and artefacts through 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?
With a focus on queer/feminist, postantropocentric and the post-western approaches to design and technology, the group explores in which forms open technology can help to achieve a greater 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.
Fellows and residents that have worked with the group include: Dr. Stefanie Wuschitz, Marie Kochsiek, Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou and Gameli Adzaho.
Conferences and symposia include:
Re/Embodied Data. Ambiguities of Knowing. In collaboration with the ZHdK Zürich, Berlin Open Lab, UdK Berlin, 20.06.2024
Hacker, Makers, Thinkers: Collective Experiments in Social Fermenting. In collaboration with Art Laboratory Berlin. Berlin Open Lab, UdK Berlin, 27-28.05.2022
Politics of the Machines: Rogue Research. In collaboration with Aalborg University, Aalto University and the International University of Beirut. Berlin Open Lab, UdK Berlin, 14-17.09.2021
Trans/Feminist Hacking: Spaces, Communities, Practices. Einstein Center Digital Future, 12-13.12.2019