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).
The anthology Practicing Sovereignty: Digital Involvement in Times of Crises by the Weizenbaum Institute’s and DRLab associated research group Inequality and Digital Sovereignty will be appearing with Transcript Publishing on November 27, 2021. It is a temporary replacement for the conference in March 2020 that had to be cancelled due to pandemic restrictions. It contains contributions by Adam Greenfield, Mona Sloane, Ramesh Srinivasan, Gesche Joost, Siegfried Zielinski, Adam Harvey, Fieke Jansen, and many more.
Digital sovereignty has become a hotly debated concept. The current convergence of multiple crises adds fuel to this debate, as it contextualizes the concept in a foundational discussion of democratic principles, civil rights, and national identities: is (technological) self-determination an option for every individual to cope with the digital sphere effectively? Can disruptive events provide chances to rethink our ideas of society – including the design of the objects and processes which constitute our techno-social realities? The positions assembled in this volume analyze opportunities for participation and policy-making, and describe alternative technological practices before and after the pandemic.