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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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Esther Zahn is a Fashion and E-Textile Designer. She gained an extensive experience in the area of FashionTech over the course of past years. For instance, she developed textile sensors to integrate and control music in garments. Moreover, she created garments with interwoven LED lights and textiles which glow in the dark or change their color when exposed to light or temperature. Her work was internationally acclaimed through exhibitions with the Goethe-Institute. Due to her specialization in the area of digital transformation of textiles and fashion, she was hired by renowned companies such as Siemens. The prestigious Bauhaus Dessau cooperated with Esther to develop a performance concept based on wireless communication. In 2016 Esther was honored for her achievements in innovation by the Association of German Engineers (VDI).