Lynn is a design researcher based in Berlin, exploring the wondrous world of science.

Lynn is currently working as a Design Researcher and Creative Engagement Manager at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, where she explores and showcases the value of design research for science communication, public engagement and collaborative learning processes in natural sciences dealing with climate change and planetary health. For her, natural history museums are innovations hubs for climate action and a key-stakeholder sustainable design and innovation processes.

She wants to bridge Design with scientific disciplines in the design education, to support design students following a career in science and to support to shape the field of design research in Germany.

She is also PHD Student, a voluntary mentor at Experimental Realisme and a Jury member at German Graduate Design Award 2023.

She is super lazy in updating this website, that does not yet show her broad range of recent and current projects.

The whole story:
Already since her studies in Communication Design at HS Trier, Lynn Harles has been involved in exploring the potential of the interdisciplinary intersection of design and science, regarding societal, technological and environmental challenges. In her master project “Design in the Anthropocene” (2016), she accompanied researchers in their field work on plastic waste pollution in the oceans and collaborated with material scientists on bio-based, speculative materialities.  For her, the role of design is not only to develop sustainable products, but rather to act as a translator and facilitator in responsible research and innovation processes. The design discipline itself is a scientific field in its own right, which renegotiates the boundaries and understanding of science.

From 2018 to 2023, she was working as Research Fellow at the Fraunhofer Center for Responsible Research and Innovation in Berlin.  As part of her work, she explored the value of Design Approaches, such Co-Design, Speculative and Critical Design approaches for Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as well as Science Communication and Public Engagement on a diverse range of topics.
In terms of this position, she developed her own research project „Food Fictions“ funded by BMBF (2021) aiming at using „speculative food design“ as narrative tool for science communication and public engagement on planetary health – from pop-up exhibitions, to cooking workshops to podcasts episodes. She was also involved in  „Transferwissenschaft“ , where she coined the value of design research for interdisciplinary knowledge transfer. To do so, she explored the commonalities between design and science since the 1960s to question supposed contradictions between different disciplines. For her, science and design are complementing each other – while science understands the world in its being, design understands the world in its becoming.

Beside her practice-based work, Lynn is also a PHD candidate at Bauhaus-University in Weimar. In her thesis, with the current working title „Between extinct species and speculative artifacts: Natural History Museum as catalysts for climate action through Design research“, she explores future roles of natural history museums (NHM) at the intersection of design research, science communication and public engagement. A special focus is placed on the role of speculative artifacts in bridging the gap between knowledge from the past, challenges of the present and probable solutions for the near future.

Following the hypothese, that NHM are the Design Research Labs of the future, she explores the potentials of intersection of NHM and Design Universities and their value for Design Education in Germany.

In the context of her research interests in science communication, she is particularly interested in science topics that deal with invisible and hard-to-imagine phenomena that continually challenge our understanding of nature, such as quantum physics, microbiology, and genetics. She wants to give shape to the invisible main protagonists of the universe, to remind us that we humans are only a small part of a very complex ecosystem.