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).
Elizabeth Calderón Lüning received her diploma in political science from the Free University of Berlin and has several years of experience in research, consulting and teaching in topics such as urban participation, civic-public partnerships and community wireless networks. She is the co-founder of the Neighbourhood Academy in the Prinzessinnengarten. Her research interests focus on the connections between digitization processes and the development of urban spaces. Elizabeth joined the Design Research Lab in 2018.