The KABK Design Lectorate is centred on a research project titled 'Design and the Deep Future', led by Dr Alice Twemlow, which examines a range of historical and contemporary responses by critics and designers to the conundrum of product and information overload, and explores speculative projects that hypothesise on how product design and its criticism might be conducted more accountably in the future. The project investigates the relationship between design and geologic time, through topics such as waste and trash, the dematerialisation of design, repair and re-use, digital detritus and space junk.

A gathering acknowledgement of design’s complicity in the climate crisis is generating demand for consideration of designed products not only in their state of imminence—not only as the shiny materialisations of design ingenuity, manufacturing labour and consumer desire—but also in terms of their afterlives, as the indelible plastiglomerates and the rusting, toxin-leaching husks they will become, and not only embedded in our present space and time, but as phenomena with consequences in our deep future.

Engagement with these and other issues is augmented through research projects, exhibitions, symposia, courses, as well as print and online publications.