These thinking toys—as we like to call them—will allow us and the cooperatives to playfully self-reflect the way we want to live together in the near future.

How do people interact in your lab?

We have biweekly team meetings and colloquia where we engage more with some of the research topics of our colleagues, exchange insights, or have invited guests. Every six months, we organize an intensive gathering for three to four days where we exchange insights and feedback from our projects and also try to transform our strategies and design new research topics or directions for the future.

We organize conferences with our
peer-research communities and also
project-based postdoctoral or senior
researchers, half a dozen Ph.D.
students, and a handful of junior
researchers who are coding or
designing specific commissions. We
also have a broad range of external
collaborators—artists, filmmakers,
and product designers for specific
productions.

What is a unique feature of your lab?

We have no unique technical features
besides the generous lab space, but
we do have unique approaches such
as our method mix, which combines
humanities-driven approaches
with practice-based ones. We are
working within a design and art
university, which is quite unusual,
since media labs are usually located
within engineering departments.

This implies that we value historical, societal, and political inquiries. The conceptual undoing of white-male-dominated biases incorporated into information technology (also known as decolonization), for example, is equally important, as are experimental design methods such as prototyping, design fiction, experimental fieldwork, participatory design, and creative coding. With Thinking Toys for Commoning, for example, we co-design with urban housing cooperatives a set of games and digital toys, which are informed by computational simulations of social dynamics, utopian visions, and histories of anarchist squatting.

→ Theater-performance event Syntegrity in collaboration with the municipal theater of the city of Basel.

→ Conference event in the lab.

→ Test environment, Designed Immediacy (2015–2017, SNSF-Project No. 156977).

@INTERACTIONSMAG 18 INTERACTIONS JANUARY–FEBRUARY2019 DAY IN THE LAB