Beyond Borders. Digital Inequalities and Systemic Change

Weekly Design Research Colloquium, winter term 2022/2023

UdK Berlin & HBK Braunschweig

Bianca Herlo and Ben Siegler

How can we shift from higher, faster, further to sustainable, fair and inclusive? While facing global crises and great threats to the living planet, we realize more and more that we have to change the system. But what do we mean by system? We want to address harmful systems like digital capitalism, in order to explore their impact and find ways to overcome them. We will be looking at forms of resistance, forms of collaboration, ways of fostering local practices, changing conditions, alternative technologies and modes of production in a postdigital and postgrowth era. In this colloquium, we will invite international guest speakers to talk about their views and practices. Based on this, we will engage in debates about the role of design in conceiving new systems and discuss our own opportunities and responsibilities for taking action.

For the colloquium we invite perspectives of various actors from different parts of the globe in order to better understand the full scope of sustainable transformations of our societies, while considering quite different approaches, affordances as well as social and cultural implications. Together we want to reflect on our role as students, teachers, scholars and as the university.

Guests: Zainab Marvi, Susanna Hertrich, Felix Kosok, Sandra Stark, Joe Lockwood, Joseph La Delfa, Liene Ozolina, Aisha Kadiri, Gilberto Vieira, Sandra Groll, Nakeema Stefflbauer, Francisco Martinez, Feher Bori, Aeneas Stankowski, Anna Litvinenko.