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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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SPEECHLESS – Age-related changes in the means of communication and forms of interaction
With an ageing population also the role of technology design changes. The raising awareness of accessible design and technology is also related to the global demographic development and the associated certainty that an increasingly ageing population will be confronted with a growing number of physical limitations, such as age-related visual or hearing impairments.
In this research project we focus on the phenomenon of access difficulties for visually and/or hearing impaired people to information channels and communication systems. We discuss the possibility of using a communication method based on the principle of interaction tactile input and output options with body-part interfaces (e.g. the hand). It is based on the assumption that this development also brings an added value to a variety of other users, not just elderly people .
A first experimental phase was conducted to test the feasibility of a flexible touch-sensitive surface made up of discreet points, created by the intersection of conductive thread.