External Event - Fault Lines: Design / Research at KABK / Leiden University

6 December 2018

Free one-day symposium organised by the KABK Lectorate Design: Design and the Deep Future.

You are warmly invited to attend this symposium that presents research activity by members of the KABK teaching community. It will feature some of the projects being developed through the current KABK Research Group, alongside contributions from invited keynote speakers, with a particular emphasis on practice-led research that uses design either as its subject matter or as a means for investigation. The symposium seeks to identify approaches, methods and tools with broader application to the growing design research culture at KABK and beyond.

Fault Lines will explore the interstitial positioning and generative potential of design research as the borders of disciplines shift, while presenting an array of research projects that map and interpret the traces of design's complicity in climate change.

How does contemporary design research inhabit the fissures between disciplinary realms and negotiate the discontinuities between them? Are there particular qualities and capacities of design-specific tools and methods, and what do they allow for? And how can the insights that arise from experimental research inquiries make a significant contribution to design practice, to education, and to knowledge?

14 December 2018
10:00 – 20:00
The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK)

RSVP here.

Featuring Members of the KABK Research Group 2018

Rachel Bacon, Tutor, BA Fine Arts
The Dark Side of Light
Bacon investigates the relationship between the mark-making activity of drawing and the extractive one of mining, and how an understanding of this relationship might contribute to the development of a non-exploitative and imaginative artistic practice capable of responding to the environmental crisis.
 
Eric Kluitenberg, Tutor, BA ArtScience, MA Art Science, and BA Interactive Media Design
Redesigning Affect Space
This public research trajectory involves partners in Berlin, Madrid and Rotterdam to develop a more diversified design-agenda for the context of Affect Space, the intermingling of (mobile) technology, affect and public space, which transcends current security and safety-driven initiatives and overly technology-centric 'smart city' discourses.
 
Niels Schrader, Co-head, BA Graphic Design and MA Non-Linear Narrative
Digital Pollution
Using online tools such as Google Earth and Google Maps in combination with site immersion and visual analysis, Schrader's project seeks to understand more fully what happens when the resources needed to create, share and store our daily output of 2,5 quintillion bytes of so-called 'virtual' data encroach on the physical environment.
 
Rosa te Velde, Tutor, Research & Discourse, BA Interior Architecture & Furniture Design
Making 'Design' Weird Again
An exploration into how fiction can be used as a strategy and research method to disrupt design history canons in order to expose issues of eurocentricity, exoticism, whiteness and/or appropriation.
 
Donald Weber, Tutor, BA Photography and MA Photography & Society
Geographies of Power
In this project, Weber appropriates satellite imagery to trace the military drone as a key vector between militarised space, the social organisation of territory, and the mediating role of photography.

With additional presentations by KABK staff members:

• Lauren Alexander, Tutor, BA Graphic Design and MA Non-Linear Narrative, Co-founder Foundland Collective
• Anja Groten, PhD Candidate, PhDArts, KABK/Leiden University, Co-founder, Hackers & Designers
• Füsun Türetken, Tutor, BA Graphic Design

With keynote lectures by invited guests:

• Marjanne van Helvert, textile designer, researcher, writer, Dirty Design, Amsterdam, NL
• Anab Jain, designer, filmmaker and educator, co-founder and director, Superflux, London, UK
• Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, founder, Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam, NL
• Susan Schuppli, artist-researcher, writer, Director and Reader of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, London, UK

Hosted and moderated by Alice Twemlow, Design Lector at the KABK and Associate Professor at Leiden University's Academy of Creative and Performing Arts.

For more information and to register please visit the symposium event page. Due to limited seating, registration is on a first-come, first-serve basis. For other inquiries: l.betting@kabk.nl.