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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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Mads Nygaard Folkmann
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Mads is a visiting professor at the Design Research Lab in the summer semester 2018. He is an associate professor of design theory, design culture and design history in the Department of Design and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark in Kolding, Denmark. His main research interests are the aesthetics of design, design as a basic condition and phenomenon of modern culture, the philosophy of design and the role of imagination in design.
Recently, his work focuses on the role and impact of digital technology on design. Taking the concept of aesthetics as a starting point, he explores how contemporary design reflects and is affected by the pervasive digital technology. In developing a theory of “post-material aesthetics”, the aim is to conceptualize the role of aesthetics for design in digital culture in relation to questions of ontology, materiality and the cultural context of design. Ultimately, the goal is to understand how design is changing due to digital technology and, accordingly, how culture changes.
He has a background in the humanities (comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen) and has written the books The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design (MIT Press, 2013) and Designkultur. Teoretiske perspektiver på design [Design Culture: Theoretical Perspectives on Design; in Danish] (Samfundslitteratur, 2016).