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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Rashid Owoyele
Alumni
Rashid Owoyele is a Nigerian-American Transdisciplinary Designer and Social Innovation expert born in St. Louis, Missouri. Rashid holds a Master of Fine Arts in Transdisciplinary Design, from Parsons The New School for Design (2013), and a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Ethics & Design with a minor and certificate in Environmental Science and Health in Public Health, from Indiana University (2010).
Rashid, in addition to being a Scientific Research Associate at the Weizenbaum Institute, is a senior-level consultant in social innovation and has taught students in 8 countries from interdisciplinary backgrounds (MBAs, BAs, MFAs, and MAs) in courses and professional programs including but not limited to the following: History of World Urbanism II and Social Justice and Design, Parsons The New School for Design. Ideation and Innovation, University of Cincinnati. Participatory and Transformation Design, Design-Led Innovation, and Social Innovation at Design Akademie Berlin.
They* joined the Weizenbaum Institute in February of 2020. As part of Owoyele’s role at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK), they will explore the implications of cooperative principles in the future networked society – including platform cooperativism and the conditions conducive to distributed ownership of ethical production.
*As a non-binary gender identified person, Rashid prefers to avoid gendered pronouns. Please refer to Owoyele using they, them, theirs or simply Rashid.