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).
Gesche Joost, Professor of Design Research at the Berlin University of the Arts, is a researcher, founder, political advisor and tech consultant. She focuses her work on the digital transformation and its implications on our society both in her research practice and on the policy level. She runs a research lab at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence specialized in human-computer-interaction and wearable computing and is part of the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin.
From 2014 to 2018, she served as the German government’s Federal Internet ambassador to the European Commission. Since 2015, she is member of the supervisory board of SAP, ING and ottobock. In 2016, she founded Calliope gGmbH, a non for-profit organization offering digital learning to children.