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).
Stefanie Wuschitz works on Critical Media Practices (feminist hacking, open source development, peer production). She graduated with an MFA in Transmedia Arts in 2006. 2008 she completed her Masters at the New York University (Interactive Telecommunications Program) and became Digital Art Fellow at Umeå University in Sweden. 2009 she founded the feminist hackerspace and collective Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna, encouraging technology and art that is developed from a female perspective. In 2014 she finished her PhD on ‘Feminist Hackerspaces. A Research on Feminist Space Collectives in Open Culture’ at the Vienna University of Technology. Together with Lifepatch and Cindy Lin Kaiying she coordinated the NENEK PROJECT, an art-based research project in Indonesia. She held Post-Doc positions at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology and was 2015-18 part of the research group tech.culture.matters at Michigan University (Prof. Silvia Lindtner). Currently she is teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and holds a research fellowship at the Weizenbaum institute research group ‘Production Possibilities of the Maker Culture’ with a focus on feminist critical making.