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).
Exploring sharing and communication practices in urban neighbourhoods while considering the situation of elderly people.
The aim of this design research project was to explore new ways to facilitate communication, sharing of resources and to encourage practices of mutual help among residents in urban neighbourhoods. Within this context, we focused on senior citizens as important actors in shaping the social fabric of urban neighbourhoods and aim to explore their particular opportunities and potentials in cross-generational communities. In our research, information and communication technologies provide the tools to interlink the different local actors and to create sustainable synergies.
By following a participatory mindset, local residents were involved as experts of their everyday living contexts and as a potential source of social innovation. In Co-design sessions that were initiated with and among the residents, we aimed to co-create highly contextual and informed insights that promise to originate in innovative prototypes and scenarios of sustainable and intuitive sharing solutions.
The project is part of an ongoing comparative research: the pilot study in Berlin is contrasted and complemented with subsequent research in Tokyo, in order to obtain an intercultural perspective on the possibilities of inclusive neighbourhood networks.
Results of Networked Neighbourhood served as point of departure for subsequent project: Neighborhood Labs.