We
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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VVV – A Tool to Support Email Encryption
The aim of the “VVV” Project is the development of a tool for the trustful distribution of encryption keys, which strengthens the protection of peoples own data when encrypting email communication. The plugin is intended to securely establish the addressee’s encryption certificate by only entering the email address. The other way around it shall provide secure access to the users own certificates, for other users of the plugin.
Throughout the whole development process a user centric design approach shall be applied to ensure the development of a tool, that can be operated intuitively and that matches the (amateur) user’s needs and demands. Besides reflecting upon the user’s perspective, the topic is investigated from a technical, legal and data-protection perspective.