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).
Susanna Hertrich holds the position of visiting researcher at Design Research Labs specialising in methods of Critical Design and Design Fiction. Having studied under Dunne & Raby, Susanna holds an MA from the Royal College of Art in London additionally to a diploma (Dipl. Des.) from the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. Between 2002 and 2006 she was appointed Professor at Bergen National Academy of the Arts in Norway. Former affiliations include Meta Perception Group of University of Tokyo, Pervasive Interaction Lab of Open University (UK) and the People and Practices Research Group of Intel Corporation in Portland (USA). Susanna Hertrich’s works appear in international exhibitions, as well as in academic publications and receive acknowledgement from both, design and art audiences.