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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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Dr. Bianca Herlo
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Bianca Herlo is a design professor and researcher working in the fields of design and digital justice, social design, digital transformation, and gender equity. She has been a professor at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Design Film Art, since September 2024. Her work focuses on digital inequalities, social and digital participation, and the social responsibility of design in digital change.
Previously, Bianca was a visiting professor at the HBK Braunschweig, Institute for Design Research, as well as a researcher at the Design Research Lab at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. She headed the research group “Inequality and Digital Sovereignty” and co-led the research group “Design, Diversity and New Commons” at the Weizenbaum Institute, and also acted as deputy head of the Design Research Lab.
Bianca studied communication in social and economic contexts, with a focus on audiovisual communication and experimental media design, at the Berlin University of the Arts. She completed her PhD on the representation of memory in biographical documentaries. As a cultural manager for the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Eastern Europe, she was director of the German Cultural Center in Sibiu, Romania, and co-founded the *.artlabs – for arts, design, and technology.
She has lectured in design and design theory at various universities, including HAWK Hildesheim, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences Dessau, Berlin University of the Arts, and weißensee kunsthochschule berlin. Bianca is a member of several scientific and review committees, a founding member of the international Social Design Network, and a member of the management committee of the COST Association for Germany (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). Since 2021, she has been chair of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF).
Together with Sana Ahmad and Lena Ullbricht, she hosts the podcast PURPLE CODE. Intersectional feminist perspectives on digital societies