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).
This mobile phone prototype employs an automatically movable weight on its inside. It explores the utility of moving weight as a tactile display in mobile phones.
Mass-Augmented Content
Through a moving center of gravity, a mobile device can display content physically enriched: Through the positioning of mass. For example, drag and drop operations can be physically supported through a synchronized movement of the device’s center of gravity, following the dragged object.
Hierarchy Representation
Non-visual information displays can be helpful in certain situations, but they are often limited in their bandwidth and the way they map digital information to physical properties. A two-dimensional weight-based display can represent two layers of hierarchy, ambiently: For instance, a meta-layer of making progress through a playlist can be displayed in parallel with a display of a the playhead’s position on the layer of individual songs.
Tactile Compass
An actuated center of weight in a mobile device may be particularly helpful in mobile navigation: It could display walking directions intuitively and non-visually, allowing users to navigate safely while not looking at the device, but simply holding it in one hand.