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).
Deeply entangled in an inescapable epoch of the seemingly ordinary Anthropocene, the need to radically reassemble relationships of ecologies and technologies is more vital than ever – to re/think socio-technical practices and re/design modes of convening with our companion species and environments. Within the framework of this block-seminar, we will discuss critical perspectives on the regulation, consumption and capitalization of both nature and tech, exploring posthuman approaches to interspecies sustainability. We will discover emerging phenomena on the topic, explore concepts of beyond-western-centric cosmogonies and the pluriverse, and drawing on the approaches of speculative design and critical making, we will debate and prototype alternative human-nonhuman relationships (with an open source soft/hard/wetware attitude), integrating critical thinking with designing.
Literature:
– Haraway, Donna (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.
– Braidotti, Rosi (2013). ‘The Posthuman’. Cambridge: Polity Press.
– Hui, Yuk (2017). Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics. e-flux Journal #86, November 2017.
*Format: If pandemic circumstances permit, we plan to meet live at the Berlin Open Lab (and in its attached garden). If this should not be possible, we will meet virtually on Zoom.
UdK Berlin + TU Berlin / 2 SWS / UdK students can gain credits for this class in the framework of the module ‘Designmethoden’ or over the Studium Generale.
Registration: Please register by 3. March 2022 with your name, field of study and matriculation number to
Participants: Max. 15
Lecturers: Prof. Dr. Michelle Christensen, Prof. Dr. Florian Conradi
Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi share a visiting professorship for Open Science (Critical Design / Critical Culture) at the Technische Universität Berlin / Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF), as well as co-heading the research group ‘Critical Maker Culture’ at the UdK Berlin / Weizenbaum Institute. Combining their backgrounds in political-, conflict-, gender-sociology and design in the form of critical practice, writing and teaching, they attempt to formulate the spaces in between these realms. Their work is an endeavour in to exploring the politics of design, material-sociology and practice-based theory.