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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Miadé – Local Community Networks in Lomé, Togo
Due to the Covid-19 crisis we had to adapt our project accordingly.
Wanting to create local community networks which are independent from local internet providers, we used the Raspberry Pi and the MAZI software, in order for the locals to share content and communicate with each other.
The main focal points administered the assurance of a sustainable community-building, increasing the participation of the marginalised groups through digitisation, strengthening their digital competencies, providing the accessibility and education about the existing digital tools and resources.
Together with our project partners and three local leads we created three workshops in three very different communities in the capital of Togo, Lomé. Those co-creation workshops were designed to extract the individual needs of those communities, introducing them to the technology of the soft- and hardware, to then create with the participants together their own local network. Thus providing more independency, access to educational recourses and a platform that can be shaped and reshaped by the communities themselves.
Because of the uniqueness of each community, very different results were achieved, allowing us to get a deeper insight in the individuality of the Togolaise culture.