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).
Žarko Dumičić is a designer and researcher originally from Zagreb, Croatia, interested in sculptural communication design artifacts, especially within the fields of data physicalization and science communication. Žarko is a research assistant at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he is also conducting his doctoral research project titled “Data Physicalization as a Design Tool for Science Communication”.
While he initially obtained a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship economics, he quickly discovered his passion for the design discipline. Žarko pursued his design education as part of Parsons School of Design in New York, USA and Glasgow School of Art in United Kingdom, where he was also selected for an exchange to Tokyo University of the Arts in Japan. He was a recipient of a stipend to research data physicalization at the Anhalt University’s design department in Dessau, Germany, as part of which he co-authored and published a systematic literature review of the design elements in the physicalization field. Furthermore, he was previously a co-founder and a co-director of an award-winning design studio that focused on development of visual identities, packaging, art direction and more, initiated in New York and subsequently based in Mumbai, India.
Žarko’s international academic and practical experience – across Zagreb, New York, Mumbai, Glasgow, Tokyo, Dessau and now Berlin – has helped him to develop a unique point of view as a designer and researcher that he thoroughly applies in his work.