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).
Design has long established itself as an independent research competence. The New Experimental Research in Design (NERD) series seeks to provide a public platform to reflect upon and discuss the specifically experimental dimension of the field. The contributions from researchers from around the world exhibit a diverse and insightful range of approaches, giving rise to further debate and action in the rapidly evolving field.
In times of multiple crises – the authors in this volume strive to find tactics of response. They introduce experiments into more-than-human design, co-species production, critical algorithmic immersion, feminist engagements with new materialism and more. From autoethnographic explorations to socially engaged methods, they challenge not just the role of design in these times, but the self-positioning of the designer.