Fault Lines: Design / Research

Free one-day symposium organized by the Lectorate Design: Design and the Deep Future at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK)—registration is open now

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?

This one-day symposium aims to surface research activity by members of the teaching community at KABK and Leiden University. It will feature some of the projects being developed through the current KABK research groups, alongside contributions from invited keynote speakers, with a particular emphasis on practice-led research that uses design either as its subject matter or 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.

Keywords: activism, affect space, algorithms, annotation, archives, argument objects, battlescape, bodies, climate change, coding, collage, commons, control, cross sections, data sets, decolonising design history, diagrams, digital alchemy, digital methods, digital sublime, dirty design, documents, drawing, drone infrastructure, ecological justice, editing, entanglements, fiction, forensics, futures, gender, geographies of power, Google Earth, Google Maps, grieving, hacking, issue networks, landscape, machine vision, mapping, material evidence, matter, metal, mining, networked images, open source, post-digital publishing, post-humans, probes, protest, prototypes, public space, reading, satellite footage, satire, scraping, sensing, server farms, site immersion, sorting, surveillance, trouble, unmaking, verticality, visualisations, web epistemology, witnessing, workshops, zooming.

Featuring keynote lectures by Marjanne van Helvert (Dirty Design), Anab Jain (Superflux), Richard Rogers (Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam) and Susan Schuppli (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths).

With presentations of research in progress by KABK and Leiden University teaching and research staff members Lauren Alexander, Rachel Bacon, Anja Groten, Eric Kluitenberg, Niels Schrader, Füsun Türetken, Rosa te Velde and Donald Weber.

Hosted and moderated by Dr. Alice Twemlow, Design Lector at the KABK and Associate Professor at Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA).

Registration
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 [​at​] kabk.nl.

Lectorate Design
The Lectorate Design, headed by Dr. Alice Twemlow, aims to nurture a robust design-focused research culture within the KABK and via the channels that connect KABK and Leiden University. 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.