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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Your Finger is the Key
In the project “Your Finger is the Key” we look into different scenarios and modifications of an innovative fingerprint card that works in combination with a card reader. The innovation hereby is that the biometric information of the fingerprint does not leave the smartcard after being enrolled. The aim is to explore together with potential users in participatory design activities different features of the card – its shape and direction, placement of a fingerprint sensor, LEDs and a PIN pad as well as LED feedback – and to adjust these details according to the requirements.
We built for this purpose various low-fi prototypes of the card, LED animations as well as packaging ideas with integrated manuals. Afterwards, we tested and discussed them in diverse situations (while acting out different possible scenarios) during iterative workshops with users. In addition, workshop participants create in co-design activities own versions of a fingerprint card.