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).
Jan-Erik Stange was born in Kaltenkirchen, Germany. He finished his bachelor degree in Industrial Design in Kiel in 2008. To gain some practical experience he worked as an intern at Human Interface Design in Hamburg and Smart Design in San Francisco. In 2009 he started a Master’s program in Interface Design at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. He joined Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in 2009 as a research assistant.