About the Design Lectorate

The Design Lectorate, headed by Prof. Dr. Alice Twemlow, and coordinated by Martha Jager, aims to nurture a robust research culture within the KABK and via the channels that connect it to other academies, universities, and research communities both locally and internationally.

Each year the Design Lectorate convenes a Research Group, a Research Club, a Research Forum, and a new edition of the Art & Design Research Practices initiative. Meanwhile, it also delivers customised faculty research consultations and workshops, student courses, and disseminates KABK faculty research through exhibitions, conferences and publications. 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.

About Design and the Deep Future

The thematic focus of the KABK Design Lectorate issues from Dr Twemlow’s research into design’s complex interrelations with time and, in particular, the material manifestations and the meanings of design when it is disposed of and becomes trash.

What in particular can art and design research approaches, methods and findings contribute to climate and environmental justice research? Building on the work done in design history, artistic research, and the environmental humanities, this project aims to offer more nuanced readings of design’s complicity in climate crisis and to contribute to a more complex, common, decolonizing and expansively iterative repository of climate justice imaginaries.

About Prof. Dr. Alice Twemlow

Prof. Dr. Alice Twemlow is Lector Design/Research Professor/Reader at the KABK. She is also a Professor at the University of Amsterdam and supervises PhD candidates who specialise in art and design-related research topics and approaches. Previously, she was the founding director of the Master Design Research, Writing & Criticism at the School of Visual Arts in New York and head of the Design Curating & Writing Master at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Twemlow has an international presence as a critic, speaker, educator, juror, and examiner on all aspects of design culture. She has an MA and a PhD in Design History from The Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and is the author of Sifting the Trash: A History of Design Criticism (MIT Press, 2017)