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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WEAR Sustain
WEAR sustain is a €3m project, funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 research and innovation initiative, which will engage artists and designers to work more closely with technologists and engineers to shift the development of the wearables and e-textile landscape towards a more sustainable and ethical approach. The project will run between January 2017 and December 2018.
In order to promote further collaboration between the arts and innovation activities, WEAR promotes cross-disciplinary/cross-sectoral collaboration and invites artist and design communities to engage the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industries, through co-design and co-development of ethical, critical, and aesthetic wearable technologies and smart textiles.
Consequently, WEAR will engage stakeholders across Europe in the development of the EU wearable technology and smart textiles industries, drawing on the rich European landscape of wearable technology and smart textile developers.
To do so, WEAR will:
- Develop a sustainable European network of stakeholders and hubs, to connect and push the boundaries in the design and development of ethical wearables
- Encourage cross-border and cross-sector collaboration between artists and technologists to design and develop a new generation of ethical and sustainable wearable technologies and smart textiles;
- Develop a framework within which future prototypes can be made that will become the next generation of what ethical and aesthetic wearables could/should be;
- Lead the emergence of innovative approaches to design, production, manufacturing and business models for wearable technologies;
- Make citizens, industry and other stakeholders more aware of the ethical, sustainable and aesthetic issues in designing, developing and use of wearable technologies.
The WEAR Sustain project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 732098.