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).
Lilo Viehweg is a design researcher and curator. Her research interest lies in the investigation of material cycles and social processes between humans and non-humans. She studied Industrial Design at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle and graduated in Product Design at the University of Arts in Berlin.
From 2016 until 2018 she was a Research Associate at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, where she developed participative mediation tools and investigated knowledge transfer processes in cooperation with the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin, the Fraunhofer IWU, the Material Archive in Zurich et al. Her works have been exhibited at the Werkbund Archive – Museum of Things Berlin, the Technology Collection Dresden, the Design Week Beirut et al.
Since 2015, Lilo Viehweg has also been teaching at various universities. She has held guest lectureships at the Zurich University of the Arts in Interaction Design, at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Integrated Design and at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in the cooperative master’s programme COOP Design Research.