We
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).
Team
Make
Projects
Stuff
Resources
Julia Mayer
Alumni
Julia is a Ph.D. student in Human-Centered Computing at New Jersey Institute of Technology (USA) joining the Design Research Lab as an intern for the summer.
Her research interests include human-computer-interaction, mobile social computing as well as user experience and interaction design, in particular for smart phones and social apps. In her work she is exploring how to build better, more useful, usable and meaningful technology-mediated social interactions, for example to support community-building.
She received her B.E. in Information Engineering from Hamburg University of Applied Science. In 2007 she won the ‘MLP – Join the best’ program and went for an internship with SAP to Bangalore, India. In 2008 she received a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States where she received her M.S. in Information Systems from New Jersey Institute of Technology. For her Master’s thesis she worked on a project exploring the design of geotemporal social recommendation systems.