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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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Athena Grandis is a designer and researcher with a BA in Visual Communication from the Berlin University of the Arts and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Her interests include feminist perspectives on digitalisation, queering technology and (more than) human-machine interaction and relationship. Her practice moves between media such as installation, print, video, wearables and illustration.
She’s currently doing her MA in Design & Computation, a transdisciplinary programme between the University of the Arts and the Technische Universität Berlin. Since 2020 she works at the Weizenbaum Institute in the research group “Design, Diversity and New Commons”.
As a graphic designer, she works for public and cultural institutions such as the Berlin Sports Museum. She is working on a publication about sport, gender and politics.