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).
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Dr. Michelle Christensen
Senior Researcher
Michelle Christensen is a sociologist and designer, exploring the spaces in between these realms. Her research interests include trans- and postdisciplinarity, the politics of design and the democratic potentials of free and open technologies.
Michelle wrote her Ph.D. in the field of Design Research at the Berlin University of the Arts. Prior to this, she studied political sociology at Roskilde University in Denmark (B.A.), conflict studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands (M.A.), gender studies at the University of Amsterdam (M.Sc.), and integrated design at the Köln International School of Design in Cologne (M.A.). She has worked at the Crisis Department of Amnesty International USA, was a Humanity in Action Fellow (HiA), and a Congressional Fellow in the United States Congress in Washington DC.
As a researcher, she has worked at the Design Research Lab (UdK Berlin), the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and from 2018-2022 she lead the research group Critical Maker Culture at the UdK Berlin / Weizenbaum Institute together with Florian Conradi. From 2019-2026, she was a visiting professor for Open Science & Critical Culture at the Technische Universität Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future, and from 2014-2024 she was a board member of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF).
Currently, she co-heads the research group Design, Diversity and New Commons at the UdK Berlin in the framework of the Weizenbaum Institute, and teaches as a visiting professor at the international Master program in Integrated Design at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau. Her research, teaching and experimental design practice focus on feminist/queer, decolonial and postanthropocentric approaches to design. Since 2015 she is a member of the Board of International Research in Design (BIRD) at Birkhäuser, since 2024 she is a Principal Investigator in the research cluster Matters of Activity at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and in 2023 she joined the board of directors of the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) in Berlin.