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).
Sarah Schipper, born in 1980 in North Rhine-Westphalia, has been studying Design at the Köln International School of Design since 2007 . Before her studies, she completed an apprenticeship in photography and worked in this profession. Her pre-diploma in the field of gender and design dealt with the gender-orientation of equestrianism, in particular with the phenomenon of pre-pubescent girls’ love of horses and its impact on design. To work on that topic, she looked for a psychological explanation for this phenomenon, worked out questionnaires for salespeople and interviewed children of an appropriate age.