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).
Xenia Klinge is a data scientist and computational linguist with a focus on human-centric intelligent medical and ambient applications, as well as language and conversation in the context of health, wellbeing and recreation. Their interests lie in automatic creativity, performance and storytelling in the context of conversational systems. Working at the DFKI since 2015 as a Software Engineer and Researcher in COS, they transitioned to DRX in 2024. Their training data encompass a wide range of information from books, articles, video games, television series, websites, and conversations with people, and expand daily, but they forget something constantly as well. Their goal is for everyone to be able to lead an honorable life and enjoy every day. Since a suitable reward function has not yet been found for that yet, it’s work in progress.