The Design Research Lab is a laboratory for experimental design and research reflecting on the digital society. Through playful interventions, critical making and collaborative reasoning we investigate possible futures. As a platform and network, we are deeply involved with the requirements and policies needed for an inclusive and sustainable development of the digital society from a design perspective.
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).
Mario Daniels is a historian of science and technology. He analyzes how governments (especially Germany and the US) regulate and curtail the international sharing of high technology through export controls, secrecy, the screening of foreign investment and travel restrictions for scientists. Since 2015 he is the DAAD Visiting Professor at the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. He holds a PhD from the University of Tübingen. He currently works on two books that analyze the impact of national security policies on the international sharing and denying of scientific-technological knowledge: Dangerous Knowledge: Economic Espionage and the Securitization of Technology Transfers in the 20th Century, a comparison of the U.S. and (West) German policies against illegal knowledge transfers; and Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America, a new history of the U.S. export control system since 1945.