Gesche Joost is Professor of Design Research at the Berlin University of the Arts and heads the Design Research Lab (www.drlab.org). Working with international partners, she develops research and teaching projects on the future of the digital society. Her focus is on human-machine interaction and social-digital participation. She is currently in charge of the “Interactive Textiles” research unit at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für künstliche Intelligenz, DFKI). Since 2017, she has been on the board of directors of the Einstein Center Digital Future Berlin and in the steering group of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, where she carries out research on digital sovereignty and maker culture.
She chairs the German Society for Design Theory and Research and sits on the board of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. She served as the German government’s Federal Internet ambassador to the European Commission from 2014 to 2018. She is a member of the synod of the evangelic church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, EKD) and a member of the Goethe Institute. In 2016, she founded Calliope gGmbH, which offers digital learning to children from the 3rd grade and up.
