We
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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Knit Alarm
In this project, we developed a wearable garment for elderly patients to call for help in case of emergency. Our motivation was to create an alarm that could be tailored to the personal preferences of the wearer and provide an unobtrusive and easy mechanism to activate an alarm. The resulting prototype demonstrates two ways of triggering an alarm that are easy but require deliberate action from the wearer. One trigger is integrated in the left cuff, which can be stretched firmly to activate the emergency call. The other trigger is activated by touching the left chest with the right cuff. The knitted cardigan is connected to a smartphone via Bluetooth. Activating one of the textile triggers will cause the phone to initiate a call to a chosen contact.
The Knit Alarm was created in the context of of the BMBF-funded Smart Senior project.
