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 ‘Shape-Changing Mobile’ prototype consists of a mobile-phone shaped box, which employs an actuated back plate: It can be tilted. The actuation is achieved through the combinatory movements of a number of servo motors. This makes it possible for the device to be thin in the pocket, but in dynamic shape when held in hands.
In the pocket, a mobile phone should be thin. When held in hands, it should ideally be tapered downwards. The Shape-Changing Mobile allows for all of this, it changes its shape according to its context of usage.
A dynamically adjustable shape allows for the addition of thickness to digital content. For example, when reading an e-book, a large body of remaining pages can be indicated through the increasing of the device’s thickness on the respective side.
Determining where the phone’s shape is pointing doesn’t require the phone to be looked at – it seems especially suitable for mobile navigation: In such an application, the phone simply points into the walking direction by deforming towards it.