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).
In collaboration with the Bundesdruckerei GmbH we explore in participatory design activities what challenges exist with the actual travel identification card – the passport. In workshop situations we discussed, discovered and evaluated user impressions that are relevant for the next passport generation.
The results of role play games in airport experiences, cultural probes of a journey, a future scenario card game, prototyping sessions and other activities were the base for a collection of user citations and requirements the Bundesdruckerei GmbH uses for the further development of the document.
We created conceptual prototypes based on the users’ needs and evaluated them with a group of users. Another step was to define recommendations for the further design decisions of the passport.