The Design Research Lab is a laboratory for experimental design and research reflecting on the digital society. Through playful interventions, critical making and collaborative reasoning we investigate possible futures. As a platform and network, we are deeply involved with the requirements and policies needed for an inclusive and sustainable development of the digital society from a design perspective.
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).
Adam Harvey (US/DE) is a researcher and artist based in Berlin focused
on computer vision, privacy, and surveillance. He is a graduate of the
Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (2010) and previously studied engineering and photojournalism at the Pennsylvania State University.
Previous projects on surveillance include CV Dazzle (camouflage from face recognition), the Anti-Drone Burqa (camouflage from thermal cameras), SkyLift (a geolocation spoofing device), and MegaPixels (interrogating face recognition information supply chains).
His work has been featured widely in media publications including the
New York Times, BBC, Spiegel, Washington Post, Wired, New Yorker, and
the Financial Times; and shown at internationally acclaimed institutions
and events including V&A museum (UK), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (KR),
Istanbul Design Biennale (TK), Frankfurter Kunstverien (DE), Zeppelin
Museum (DE), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (US), and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (US).
Recently, Harvey developed VFRAME, a computer vision project that helps
human rights researchers use visual forensic tools for OSINT
investigations. VFRAME received an Award of Distinction from Ars
Electronica in 2019, was nominated for for the EU STARTS prize in 2018,
nominated for the Beazley Design of The Year Award in 2019, and received
a Rapid Response grant from EYEBEAM for developing computer vision tools to analyze police imagery.