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).
Design is essentially involved in the cultural production of gender images and representations by creating products, services and digital interfaces. However, the aspect of gender is not systematically reflected in design research and practice yet. Artifacts which explicitly address men and women often do not represent user-friendly and gender-egalitarian solutions. They frequently confirm stereotypes of femininity and masculinity which nowadays may not be suitable any more.
For this reason, we aim to develop a conceptual framework for a gender-informed design approach establishing the aspect of gender as an essential design criterion next to requirements of e.g. formal aesthetics or usability. This framework shall sensitize designers and design researchers for the gender dimension within their work.
We draw especially attention to concepts which provide ideas to change gender images. On a theoretical level, we essentially refer to constructivist and deconstructivist gender theories and ask how far they can contribute to deduce design implications for a modification and diversification of gender representations and experiences. Moreover, we discuss existing design approaches and analyse artifacts to make their underlying gender assumptions explicit. Following Butler’s request for a subversive gender confusion, we aim to deliver a systematic theoretically and empirically underpinned design approach which encourages designers and design researchers to playfully explore the design potential of gender to offer diverse gender representations and experiences.