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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Memories of the Future
The reconstruction of past experiences always conveys present perspectives, ideologies, tendencies and expectations. What does it mean to deal with the past, the present and the future? How can we sharpen the awareness of the interrelations between those layers, and how do memories and their traces shape our ways to envision future situations?
By reading the narratives of the past, we are able to develop strategies to envision the future, to imagine intercultural spaces in a highly diverse setup. We have the capacities to connect, on a local as well as global scale, initiatives that embrace the hidden memories of a place and translate them into a better understanding of the specific dynamics. Those dynamics determine and regulate present as well as future interactions.
In the conference track “Memories of the Future” we have worked on how to collect and represent the personal stories of residents in Ajami/Jaffa, gather insights into personal as well as collective experiences in a diverse society and build up on it for future perspectives. The track addressed the value of storytelling for understanding current societal issues and anticipate future relations and meaningful encounters in public space.