We
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).
Team
Make
Projects
Stuff
Resources
Dr. Florian Conradi
Senior Researcher
Florian Conradi is a designer and researcher combining critical theory and design as an approach to critical practice. He studied art and design at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (MFA), the Köln International School of Design in Cologne (MA), and wrote his Ph.D. in the field of Design Research at the UdK Berlin.
Since 2008 he has been initiating sociopolitical design projects with institutions in the field of critical media, political advocacy and artistic research, carrying out field research in Europe, the Middle East, East and West Africa. As a researcher he has worked for the Design Research Lab, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), from 2018-2022 he lead the research group Critical Maker Culture at the UdK Berlin (Weizenbaum Institute) together with Michelle Christensen, and he is an associated researcher at the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) in Berlin.
He has taught critical approaches to design and design methods at amongst other places the Köln International School of Design and the UdK Berlin. In 2018-2019 he was a visiting professor at the international Master program in Integrated Design (MAID) at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau, and from 2019-2024 he taught as a visiting professor for Open Science/Critical Design at the Technische Universität Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future.
Currently he heads the research group “Design, Diversity and New Commons” at the Berlin University of the Arts / Weizenbaum Institute.