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).
As a sociologist and software developer Marie Kochsiek is interested in the intersections between technologies and societies, especially with respect to digital health tracking and digital rights. She co-founded the hackspace for women* in Berlin-Kreuzberg called the Heart of Code e.V. and is an active member. Building on the results of her master’s research she founded the Bloody Health Collective, which is developing a free and open source period tracking app called drip, that has received funding by the German Ministry of Education and Research and the Mozilla Foundation. She studied Social Science (B.A.) at the Humboldt-University Berlin and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Interdisciplinary Latin American Studies (M.A.) at the Free University Berlin. At the Weizenbaum Institute she is part of the Research Group ‘Production Possibilities of the Maker Culture’ for the duration of June until December 2019.