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).
Nicole Gütl was born in 1983 in Bavaria. After various internships in restoration of old things at Dresden and Weimar she completed an apprenticeship as milliner in Berlin. Besides some academic trips in biology, physics, art and french in Berlin, Leipzig and Lyon she was working at the Opera of Leipzig in the millinery department and coming back to Berlin in 2009 for studying fashion design at UdK. Her global curiosity in science based on tv space nights at Bayern3 and admiring physic experiments of Knoff Hoff Shows. The interest in storytelling material and things and how things function in the real world and sociological context was driving her to apply for the work within the field of interactive textiles in the Design Research Lab.