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).
This project broaches the issue of assitive communication and how it can be transferred to rather universal use.
In five short video clips (ca. 90 sec each) we show solutions for supporting both deaf and non-deaf communication. The concepts include a mobile alert recognition (1); a mobile app for receiving realtime information (2, 3); a rough approach broaching the issue of finger-spell-communication (4); and a hardware solution for freehand communication (5).
All five result from a participatory project collaboration between the Design Research Lab Berlin and the Deaf Institution Sinneswandel, as part of the research project “Dis/ability-oriented Interaction”.