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).
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Dr. phil. Katharina Bredies
Alumni
Katharina Bredies was born in 1981 in Bremen, Germany, where she studied Integrated Design at the Hochschule für Künste. During her studies, she worked as a product designer, 3D modeler and animator. She finished her studies in 2006 with a diploma thesis about the use of cybernetic systems analysis in design. Her interests cover research into interaction design and design theory as well as illustration, animation and comic books.
She joined the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in 2006, where she works as a research scientist and PhD student. In her doctoral thesis, she investigates the value of irritation in design. In addition, she is collaborating on other current research projects on transferability and design research methods. Her main field of research by now covers electronic textiles and the combination of traditional textile production techniques with electronic functionality.
As of April 2014, Katharina is also a postdoctoral researcher with the School of Textiles in Borås, Sweden.