Organised by the Lectorate Design

How does contemporary design research inhabit the fissures between disciplinary realms and negotiate the discontinuities between them?

Are there particular qualities and capacities of design-specific tools and methods and what do they allow for?

And how can the insights that arise from experimental research inquiries make a significant contribution to design practice, to education, and to knowledge?

This symposium presents research activity by members of the KABK teaching community with a particular emphasis on practice-led research that uses design either as its subject matter or means for investigation. It will feature some of the projects being developed through the current KABK Research Group, alongside contributions from invited keynote speakers. The symposium seeks to identify approaches, methods and tools with broader application to the growing design research culture at KABK and beyond.

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Featuring members of the KABK Research Group 2018 :

Rachel Bacon, tutor, BA Fine Arts
The Dark Side of Light
Bacon investigates the relationship between the mark-making activity of drawing and the extractive one of mining, and how an understanding of this relationship might contribute to the development of a non-exploitative and imaginative artistic practice capable of responding to the environmental crisis.

Eric Kluitenberg, tutor, BA ArtScience, MA Art Science, and BA Interactive Media Design
reDesigning Affect Space
This public research trajectory involves partners in Berlin, Madrid and Rotterdam, to develop a more diversified design-agenda for the context of Affect Space, the intermingling of (mobile) technology, affect and public space, which transcends current security and safety-driven initiatives and overly technology-centric ‘smart city’ discourses.

Niels Schrader, co-head, BA Graphic Design and MA Non-Linear Narrative
Digital Pollution
Using online tools such as Google Earth and Google Maps in combination with site immersion and visual analysis, Schrader’s project seeks to understand more fully what happens when the resources needed to create, share and store our daily output of 2,5 quintillion bytes of so-called ‘virtual’ data encroach on the physical environment.

Rosa te Velde, tutor, Research & Discourse, BA Interior Architecture & Furniture Design
Making ‘Design’ Weird Again
An exploration into how fiction can be used as a strategy and research method to disrupt design history canons in order to expose issues of eurocentricity, exoticism, whiteness and/or appropriation.

Donald Weber, tutor, BA Photography and MA Photography & Society
Geographies of Power
In this project, Weber appropriates satellite imagery to trace the military drone as a key vector between militarized space, the social organization of territory and the mediating role of photography.

With additional presentations by KABK staff members:

Lauren Alexander, tutor, BA Graphic Design and MA Non-Linear Narrative, co-founder, Foundland Collective
Anja Groten, PhD candidate, PhDArts, KABK/Leiden University, co-founder, Hackers & Designers
Füsun Türetken, tutor, BA Graphic Design

With keynote lectures by invited guests:

Marjanne van Helvert, textile designer, researcher, writer, Dirty Design, Amsterdam, NL
Anab Jain, designer, filmmaker and educator, co-founder and director, Superflux, London, UK
Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, founder, Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam, NL
Susan Schuppli, artist-researcher, writer, Director and Reader of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, London, UK

Hosted and moderated by Alice Twemlow, Design Lector at the KABK and Associate Professor at Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA).

About the Lectorate Design

The Lectorate Design, headed by Dr. Alice Twemlow, aims to nurture a robust design-focused research culture within the KABK and via the channels that connect KABK and Leiden University. Launched in September 2017, the lectorate is centred on a research project titled Design and the Deep Future, which explores the relationship between design and geological time.