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).
Generalizability is an important research concept for the analytical field. We propose and explore ‘Transferability’ for the projective field – Design.
We believe, in order to create the new, design knowledge is transferred and not generalized. We consider abduction to be the logical mechansim underlying this transfer process. In our designerly terminology, we speak of ANALYSIS (the inductive process), PROJECTION (the abductive process) and SYNTHESIS (the deductive process). We hold two further assumptions; firstly, projecting new artefacts is independent from analyzing design context or problem. Secondly, existing artefacts are knowledge sources for projection. Since 2007, we have been examining these beliefs and assumptions. We have also been developing an approach Case Transfer and a method Rip+Mix based on our inquiry.