We
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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Paola Pierri
Alumni
Paola Pierri is a researcher working in the field of Design Anthropology, with an interest in forms of activism and participatory democracy. She is completing her Doctoral programme at the University of the Arts London (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Centre), with a thesis that looks at the relationship between design and political creativity. She is currently a Lecturer at UAL and she has previously collaborated with the University of Liverpool on a research project exploring the model of Citizens Assemblies as one of the potential ways to increase citizens’ engagement around the future of the EU.
Paola has a background in Political Theory and a MA in Development. She is a Research Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institut, collaborating with the Research Group N8 on Inequality and Digital Sovereignty. Her research interests are around the role of design approaches in shaping publics and in encouraging political participation. She is particularly interested in the impact of the digital ecosystem on civic and political discourses.