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).
Berkay Soykan is a Berlin-based computational design student, creative technologist and prospective designer. His main interest lies in the critical analysis of emerging technologies and their interplay with our physical and virtual world. Deriving from post-digital ontologies, he is constantly searching for ways to reappropriate computer technologies, arguably the epitomic tools of the Anthropocene, in non-anthropocentric and non-Western contexts.
Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, Berkay received his B.Sc. in management and computer science at Technical University of Munich. After working in high-tech environments at start-ups and multinational companies, he decided to pursue critical design approaches towards new technologies. Berkay is currently studying in the master’s program Design & Computation at University of the Arts and Technical University of Berlin.