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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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Bianca is a researcher, lecturer and designer based in Berlin. She is head of the research group “Inequality and Digital Sovereignty” at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, the German Internet Institute, deputy head of the Design Research Lab, and as of October 2022 she holds the interim professorship for design sciences at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK Braunschweig).
Over the last years she has been researching the role of design and technology for participation and social justice. Within Social Design and Civic Design, she experiments with art’s and design’s agencies between bottom up processes, public institutions and formalized politics. Bianca studied communication in social and economic contexts, with focus on audio-visual communication, and experimental media design at the Berlin University of the Arts. She did her PhD on the representation of memory in biographical documentaries. As a cultural manager of the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Eastern Europe, she has been director of the German Cultural Center Sibiu, Romania, and co-founder of the *.artlabs – for arts, design and technology. Bianca has been a lecturer in design and design theory at various universities, including the HAWK Hildesheim, Anhalt University Dessau, the Berlin UdK and weißensee kunsthochschule berlin. She is member of several scientific and review committiees, founding member of the international Social Design Network and member of the management committee of the COST Association for Germany (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). Since 2021, she has been chairwoman of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF).
Together with Sana Ahmad and Lena Ullbricht, she is hosting the podcast PURPLE CODE. Intersectional feminist perspectives on digital societies