With this video interview, we present the concluding edition of the KABK Design Lectorate’s research methods series. KABK warmly thanks departing lector Alice Twemlow for her many contributions to design and artistic research.
Counter-Mapping as a research method
In this fourth edition of the Art and Design Research Practices series, initiated by Alice Twemlow and Niels Schrader, KABK Design Lectorate turns its attention to counter-mapping as an artistic research practice.
While previous editions explored walking, touching, and listening, this interview examines how counter-mapping can serve as a tool for resisting and reimagining prescribed borders and territories, and raises complex questions around representation, participation, and ethics.
For this interview, Design Lector Alice Twemlow spoke with Sophie Dyer, a designer, researcher, educator, and one half of the feminist collective Open-Weather. In their practice, Soph combines participatory and investigative methods to create digital archives, tools, evidentiary models, maps, and speculative fiction.
Alice and Soph met at the National Archives in The Hague, where nearly a thousand years of Dutch history are preserved across 142 kilometres of documents and 800 terabytes of digital files. Twemlow and Schrader are currently working with the publisher Hatje Cantz on a publication on counter-mapping.
Sophie ‘Soph’ Dyer is a designer, educator, and one half of the feminist collective, Open-Weather. Their work explores feminist and anticolonial approaches to the weather and climate, and social justice issues more broadly. As Open-Weather, they co-created accessible resources for DIY satellite imagery reception and decoding. Until 2023, Soph was part of Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab, where they led the organisation’s crowdsourcing initiative to create the first city-wide map of surveillance cameras in New York City, which then was used to sue the NYPD.
Credits video
Presented by Design Lectorate, Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague
Sophie Dyer in conversation with Alice Twemlow
Initiative Niels Schrader and Alice Twemlow
Initiative: Niels Schrader and Alice Twemlow
Art Direction: Niels Schrader
Director of Photography: Roel Backaert
Camera and Editing: Yannick van de Graaf
Music: Laura Dillettante
