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).
With a former background in the political field Birte loves to connect science to politics. She joined the Design Research Lab in 2016 as a research assistant.
Her interests are new ways of working (Arbeiten 4.0), new ways of producing (Industrie 4.0, Smart Services) and enabling kids to the digital world (Bildung 4.0). Currently she is working on a project that analyses the impact of digital technologies on business and society, to better understand digital transformation opportunities for middle seized companies.