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).
Pablo Torres is an anthropologist and current student of the M.A. Design & Computation at the UdK and the TU in Berlin. Most of his inquiries on sociocultural phenomena are developed and referred to through sonic means, with which he aims to develop diverse ways of understanding such phenomena.
He finds great interest in sensorial experience as a vehicle with which knowledge on the relation between humans and their environment is reframed. He joined the Design Research Lab in 2021.