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).
Hannah Perner-Wilson combines conductive materials and craft techniques, developing new styles of building electronics that emphasize materiality and process. She received a B.Sc. in Industrial Design from the University for Art and Industrial Design Linz and an M.Sc. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, where she was a student in the High-Low Tech research group. Since 2006 Hannah has collaborated with Mika Satomi, forming the collective KOBAKANT. In 2009, as research fellows at the Distance Lab in Scotland, KOBAKANT published the website titled How To Get What You Want, where they share their textile sensor designs and DIY approach to E-Textiles.