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).
Within the »Community Now?« project the first part of the student exchange took place end of February 2014 in which students from different disciplines of Berlin University of the Arts students travelled to Israel. For reflecting and capturing their experiences and unexpected insights during the rich journey we designed Cultural Probes. Those probes are especially developed for reflecting everyday behavior and the local uniquenesses in those two cultures and neighborhoods. The probes were also prepared for the Bezalel students who came to Berlin in June 2014. It should serve as basis for discussion.
The development of the method was realized within the bilateral Project »Community Now?«.