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).
Interactex is an open-source platform for interactive electronic textiles. It consists of a collection of e-Textile patterns that serve as electronic parts and components, and an open source hardware and software development for easy e-textile prototyping and testing.
The initial version of the app was developed as part of the project Wearable M2M by TU Munich. In the project EIT ICT Connected Textiles, the apps were redesigned and extended. They are now available on the Apple app store. We are working on further improving and extending the system in future projects.