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).
Sandra Buchmüller passed her exam at the Köln International School of Design in 2001. Since then she has worked as a design researcher in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Uta Brandes in the area of gender and design, as a freelance designer for RTL Enterprises and the Entwicklungs-Gesellschaft Zollverein at the World Heritage Site Zollverein as well as a user experience designer for Vodafone, T-Systems and Deutsche Telekom Laboratories. She also gathered teaching experiences as a visiting lecturer at the Köln International School of Design and the University of Applied Science and Arts (HAWK) Hildesheim, Göttingen, Holzminden.
At the Design Research Lab, she investigates the relationship between design and gender, evaluates design approaches, methods and theories from a gender sensitive point of view with regard to the development of a framework that supports a gender-informed design of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).