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).
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.