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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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Sam Hill is a member of the Design Research Lab and a Senior Consultant with the DFKI Design Research eXplorations (DRX) team. He is involved with new partner and project acquisition, team entrepreneurial activities, and strategic planning. Sam has nearly 20 years of experience in the development of industrial automation and software solutions, sustainability platforms, and electro-optical sensor systems. He has founded three companies, two in the US and one in Germany within the fields of green energy, biotechnology, and quantum-computational systems and processes. Sam has a background in imaging and photographic technology from the Rochester Institute of Technology and graduate degrees in optical sciences from the University of Arizona and media sciences and technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.