The Lectorate Design at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague will launch their publication 'Touching: A Research Method in Art and Design" on 2 September. When we want to check the facts, to verify our ‘epistemic grip on reality’, as the philosopher Ophelia Deroy puts it, the sense for which we reach is touch. And while touch can certainly be used to elicit and ‘grip’ knowledge, it can also be used in a more tentative and probing modality — to feel our way toward truths that are both within and yet always beyond the grasp.
Whether engaging with materials to give tangible form to ideas, or using materials as the very starting point of a creative process, artists and designers recognise that this kind of feeling-toward-knowing requires deep patience and an openness to what a material is willing to impart.
This publication, designed by Niels Schrader, contains interviews, research samples, recipes, quotations, and reflections on the research process by tutors, workshop instructors and students all across the KABK community. The range of materials and processes engaged with is diverse and the approaches are as unique as fingerprints, but a premise embedded in the DNA of material research is that experiments are shared.
This publication is part of the Lectorate Design's initiative
