Open Lab: Athens
Open Lab Athens is a non-for-profit organisation; a design initiative of researchers and practitioners who engage in spaces of “social innovation”. Acknowledging the politics and values embedded in any system and infrastructure, we work with social movements, social solidarity economy and commoning initiatives. Our co-design work aims to conceive social and technical systems that sustain and reproduce practices of solidarity, horizontality, and radical democratic participation.
All involved methodologies depart from Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach and our members come from diverse backgrounds (i.e. computing science and engineering, sociology and humanities), which in combination give shape to an interdisciplinary approach to technology design. Our research contributes to Computing, Social Movements, Design and Digital Civics research.
Team members
Hara Kouki is a Junior Research Fellow at the Dpt. of Geography, University of Durham, an adjunct lecturer at the Hellenic Open University, while she is also affiliated with the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) at Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence). Trained as a historian at the University of Athens, Hara completed her PhD at Birkbeck College (University of London) and have worked as a research fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute (Florence) and as an adjunct lecturer at the Dpt. of Sociology, University of Crete.
Hara’s research traces the ways communities, inequalities and collective action take shape and interrelate in different contexts and periods of time. In her research she combines ethnography and history to study and defamiliarize the present while relying on participatory action-research to engage with communities and contribute to the design of technologies.
Giannis Efthimiou is social researcher with a statistical background. He has also taken up Full-Stack Software Development and really enjoys it. His interests involve ICT and their disruptive uses, equality & social justice issues, education, ingenious ways that people invent in order to re-shape the boundaries of our realities.
