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).
DIY – Do it yourself has a long tradition in clothing and has a rich infrastructure of instructions, DIY-kits and meeting/courses. This approach can be applied to the production of intelligent textiles equipped with sensors, where a breakthrough in the market remains to be seen.
Different Portals are already providing distribution opportunities for handmade products, but didn’t offering a systematic exchange between customers and manufacturers. This means that for DIY-maker it’s at the moment difficult to create personalized clothing. In addition the access to qualfied professional products is not possible, because the simply access to a professional production infrastructure and the expertise to use it is missing. This comes along with expertises in programming and electrical engineering, which are not only of great importance for the Maker, but also for professional suppliers a hurdle. A system of personal services is needed in order to draw on missing competences.
MYOW aims to bring through digitally enriched service-spaces designers, makers, service providers and manufacturers together. The focus are person-related services, which will be combined into a service chain with the help of the MYOW-system.
The MYOW-infrastructure allows DIY-makers to create professional products, service providers to expand their own offerings in line with demand, manufacturers to expand their product range and all providers to form service chains with providers from other sectors. In the project developed business models not only regulate the co-productions, they also enable the expansion of the service range of suppliers, the emergence of new products by manufacturers and the leap forward in the from the private “DIY-Making” for the foundation of a company.