With this initiative, we aim to identify and share a range of research methods practised at KABK that use the tools, approaches, and capacities of art and design to create and surface new knowledge. They include prototyping/probing, mapping/diagramming, drawing and sensing.
Walking
This first edition explores the research method of walking from a design perspective. It features the working process used by public space and landscape designers Krijn Christiaansen and Cathelijne Montens (KCCM), who teach field research in the BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design programme at KABK.
Design Lector Alice Twemlow visited the designers in their serene home-work space near Noordwijk to learn more about how and why KCCM makes research (specifically walking) a method central to their work.
Watch a video of the interview here:
During their conversation, Twemlow, Christiaansen and Montens discuss a speculative urban planning project in Saga City, Japan. The designers attempted to reactivate the city’s extensive system of ancient waterways and find points of entry and connection for local communities. In addition to their initial archival research, mapping of the waterways, interviews and conversations with residents, KCCM conducted 24 walks. They collected the memories, stories, images, impressions and objects that the creek network contained. In practical terms, this meant wading in the creeks and videoing their progress from a frog’s-eye-perspective along with dredging and excavating artefacts from the creek beds and making rubbings and photographs of structures on the creek banks.
The designers also talk about how they integrate this method in their teaching at KABK, reflecting more generally on the capacities of walking as a method and how they differ when it is conducted from a design rather than a geographical perspective.
Credits for video interview:
Krijn Christiaansen and Cathelijne Montens
Tutors, KABK Interior Architecture & Furniture Design
in conversation with Alice Twemlow, KABK Design Lector
Art Direction: Niels Schrader
Director of Photography: Roel Backaert
Camera and Editing: Yannick van de Graaf
Music: Lance Laoyan
Script: Martijn de Heer
What’s next
We will add resources to this website to further explore walking as a research method in art and design. These include interviews with practitioner-tutors, essays, exemplars of tutor and student projects that use the method, exemplars of assignments, reading lists and a glossary of terms connected to the method.
