DESIGN RESEARCH research

DESIGN RESEARCH Research

Master Industrial Design, KABK Rosa te Velde

CONVERSATIONS WITH Alice Twemlow, Saskia van Stein, Dori Tunstall, Yassine Salihine, Shailoh Phillips, Honor Newman, Sandipan Nath, Elena Genesio, Johanna Günzl

Rosa te Velde

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Alice Twemlow

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Research at the crossroads

Research for/through/into design: Centering methods, sensibilities and approaches of design practice

Saskia van Stein

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Dori Tunstall

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Yassine Salihine

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Shailoh Phillips

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Honor Newman

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Sandipan Nath

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Elena Genesio

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Johanna Günzl

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The head, the heart, the hand and the eye: Employing artistic research sensibilities in design

Drawing on ‘all your relations’: Research as a way to check assumptions and ethics

Investigative journalism and/as design research: Teaching design research (1)

Theory in practice: Teaching design research (2)

Research mapping

Research mapping

Research mapping

Research mapping

Design research research

Research at the crossroads

Introduction

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Jeroen van den Einde, Het huis van ik: ideology en theorie in het Nederlandse vormgevingsonderwijs, Arnhem: ArtEZ Press, 2015 pp. 298. See also: Frederike Huygen, ‘Eigenzinnig en controversieel: de criticus Simon Mari Pruys, deel 2’, 2009. Accessed through: https://www.designhistory.nl/2009/eigenzinnig-encontroversieel-de-criticus-simon-mari-pruys-deel-2/.

Ibid.

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On the occasion of the graduation in 1962, Beljon held a speech, explaining how the course was situated somewhere between art, industry and technology, and how ambiguous the position of the department was: “The reality forces us often to take a fighting stance, sometimes against the arts, sometimes against industry and technology”.1 At the time in the Netherlands, a persistent complaint was the lack of appreciation for this new field of industrial design.

“To the artist we try to make clear that our primary task is most certainly not to make beautiful things; towards the merchant we maintain that optimum saleability should not be regarded as the highest criterion for an industrially manufactured product. Such statements (we know this) make us suspect among large groups.”2 Both the industry as well as the arts weren’t exactly thrilled and welcoming at first. What Industrial Design should entail and what the role of the designer should be remained an issue of concern and confusion. When designer and critic Simon Mari Pruys began teaching a class titled ‘theoretical aesthetics’ as part of the course in 1969, he developed a more socially oriented vision on design. In 1972, the year the report of the Club of Rome was published, Pruys aligned himself with prominent voices such as Victor Papanek, who one year earlier had published the by-now canonical book Design for the Real World. Like Papanek, Pruys urged designers to take responsibility for

1 Joop Beljon, cited in: Jeroen van den Einde, Het huis van ik: ideology en theorie in het Nederlandse vormgevingsonderwijs, Arnhem: ArtEZ Press, 2015 pp. 294.

It was in 1950 that the first course in Industrial Design in the Netherlands was founded at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) – by royal decree. It was a weekend course meant for people working full time in the industry.

The curriculum included statics, mechanics, ergonomics, psychology, sociology and business administration. Sculptor and critic Joop Beljon, who would often write under his pseudonym B. Majorick, and who would become director of the KABK in 1962, had been involved in the foundation of the department. Beljon was inspired by the British art philosopher Herbert Read, the author of Art and Industry: Principles of Industrial Design (1934) among many other publications, and by Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus in their aims of merging form and function, arts and industry, and theory and practice.

the ways in which design played a role in ‘the throwaway society’. Envisioning the role of designers as ‘coordinators’, Pruys believed that designers could fulfil “a harmonising factor in a playing field with competing interests,” which he felt would save the world from its pending collapse.3 Interestingly, within the span of its first 15 years, the focus of the course moved from aiming to establish itself as an authority between art, industry and technology, to confronting itself with its culpability in the consequences of those entanglements – namely overproduction and overconsumption. In both cases, the role of the designer is paramount, ambiguous or even paradoxical. After all, the designer’s role – its promise and its responsibility – is tied to an industry that is a catapulting force.

Fast-forward to today’s department, which in 2017 was redeveloped from a ‘postgraduate course’ into a Master programme, and since then has been headed by designer Maaike Roozenburg, the question of social responsibility of the industry is still central. At a time when design has expanded to include professions such as ‘service design’ or ‘experience design’, and, at a time of social crises and climate breakdown to which Industrial Design is complicit, the profession of the industrial designer is almost a rarity, according to tutor and designer Yassine Salihine. What are the urgent questions for a course in ‘Industrial Design’, knowing that the relation between the industry and design remain contentious and unsettling?

After becoming the head of the Master Industrial Design (MID) programme in 2017, Roozenburg identified the intersection between technical and art education as a crucial space for developing responsible alternatives: if we can critically question technology and industrial systems – more critically and freely than technical education allows for – we can change things on a large scale. Roozenburg has noticed that the use of ‘Industrial Design’ sometimes causes confusion, but she insists on using the title for the department.

“I really want us to relate to processes of production in the broadest sense. We need to engage with industry and look at it systemically and critically. Research should be central to these questions. Being in an art academy, we are in an ideal position to develop critical positions.” According to Roozenburg, one of the things the MID programme can offer is a strong programme for conducting ‘design research’. “Currently, design research is implemented throughout the programme, but we could deepen this. How do we understand ‘design research’? How can we centre research in our programme?”

Research at the crossroads

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Two recent publications on art and design research include: Gabrielle Kennedy (ed.), IN/SEARCH: RE/SEARCH, Imagining scenarios through art and design, Amsterdam: Valiz / Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Sandberg, 2020. Dirk Vis, Research for people who think they would rather create, Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2021. This publication was published in collaboration with the Research Centre of the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. An earlier publication, focused on artistic research, is by Janneke Wesseling, who heads the KABK Lectorate Art Theory & Practice: Janneke Wesseling (ed.), See it Again, Say it Again: The Artist as Researcher, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2011.

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Ibid., p. 25.

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Art schools are categorised as HBO (hoger beroepsonderwijs, higher vocational education), between MBO (middelbaar beroepsonderwijs, seconary vocational education and training) and WO (wetenschappelijk onderwijs, scientific education).

5 Josephine Berry, ‘Agents of objects of discontinuous change? Blairite Britain and the role of the Culturepreneur’, in: Kunstlicht (2017) 37:1 p. 26.

At the same time public funding for the infrastructure that is needed to do in-depth research is limited, and with it, the time and space available, through the reorganisation of public education at the hands of the managerial class.

How can we, in spite of this, create and nurture a culture in which we cherish meticulous, slow, and engaged ways of doing research, while foregrounding ethics and studying?

4 I underwent the developments described here myself. My background as a designer with a BA in design from an art school (DesignLAB, Gerrit Rietveld Academie) after which I could transfer to an MA at the VU University in a programme called Design Cultures, is exemplary of this ‘flexibility’.

This publication was instigated with such questions: How do we understand ‘design research’, when ‘design’, and ‘research’ in particular, have gained currency over the past decades and are used so broadly and understood so differently? Today, R&D departments, innovation labs and ‘design thinking’ are part and parcel of any serious company and public institution. When talking about research, we need to understand it in the context of the ‘knowledge economy’ and the ‘information society’ that have risen in the past thirty to forty years, and also, in relation to the Bachelor/Master system which was introduced in 1999 as part of the Bologna Process in Europe. This system allowed for more flexible exchange between programmes and expertise, breaking down rigid categories of professions and the idea of one lifelong career.4 Instead, the neoliberal adage of ‘lifelong learning’ was needed for “the commercial need to innovate and compete in a global marketplace”.5 Reflecting on the rise of the ‘culturepreneur’ since the 1990s in the UK, art theorist Josephine Berry points out that subjects need to be formed in order to become ‘agents of change’ in the global marketplace, and thus internalise the need to constantly adjust, adapt, and reconsider opportunities for betterment and innovation. She cites one of Tony Blair’s advisors Charles Leadbeater, from his book Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (1999): “The more rapid and discontinuous the nature of knowledge creation within an industry, the more conducive it is for entrepreneurship.”6 In other words, innovation, research and the market go hand in hand.

With the backdrop of these developments, our educational institutions train us not for a career or profession but for an attitude: one needs to continuously seek new sources and develop new research agendas. There is a tension and a pitfall in this. As much as research has become central in this economy, its rationale is to continuously produce new knowledge and therefore it is disruptive or indeed ‘discontinuous’.

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Introduction

Following the example of the UK, over the past decades the Dutch government has divested from education, albeit has not privatised it, but research has become prominent on the agenda, as it is considered the key driver for innovation. For higher education, including art schools, this has meant that a strong research agenda has been developed over the years, with the aim of bridging theory and practice. Art schools in the Netherlands offer education which is categorised between vocational and university education, but they prefer to associate themselves with universities as they take on the label ‘University of Applied Sciences’.7 Special professorships (lectorates) have been established at the HBO level, whose function it is to instil and nurture a research culture within art schools.

Theory, research and discourse have become increasingly central to the curriculum in art education. Institutions have published research manifestos, introduced honours programmes in collaboration with universities, along with artistic research and PhD programmes (third cycles).

Critical, philosophical, technical as well as celebratory articles, books and conference papers on the ‘artistic research’, artistic knowledge production and ‘designerly ways of knowing’ have been produced.8 Research is hailed, but what is its purpose?

Against this background of the history of the MID programme and the repurposing of ‘research’ in the last decades – we have to ask what does design research do, and for whom? Whose purpose does it serve, particularly in the context of ‘Industrial Design’? How can we create an educational environment, in which the transformative pleasure of searching, finding things out, experimenting and bringing into relation are central? How can we ensure that a course in industrial design has ethics and social responsibility at its core, and how can this be cultivated through a shared research agenda?

By bringing together people in various positions and relations to the MID department, this publication aims to show the many understandings of design research, and the commonalities and differences amongst them. It asks how these perspectives could be drawn upon by the MID department, in order to create a slightly more stable and shared ground to depart from and come back to, and to incite conversations on the challenges and the joys of research within the framework of Industrial Design.

Research at the crossroads

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As someone who was invited to teach in the department in 2020, I spoke with several educators and designers in different positions: lector, head, tutors, and alumni, all of whom were either involved directly in the programme, or who I felt could contribute insights from which we could learn. Alice Twemlow, Lector Design at KABK, elaborates on the longstanding distinction between research for, into and through design. She stresses the purpose of doing research, which according to her is making findings public. Saskia van Stein, head of the MA programme Critical Inquiry Lab at Design Academy Eindhoven, speaks about artistic research, the importance of embodied research, and the challenges of and for the field of design. Design anthropologist Dori Tunstall, Dean of the Faculty of Design at OCAD University, Toronto, reflects on the importance of conducting research as part of the design process to better understand and test the student’s assumptions and the implications of what they want to do before putting something out into the world. MID tutors Yassine Salihine and Shailoh Phillips share how they understand ‘design research’ and how they translate their ideas concretely in their classes. And then, Honor Newman, Sandipan Nath, Elena Genesio and Johanna Günzl, all alumni of the MID programme, share their experiences of studying at the programme. They speak specifically about the research semester in the first part of the second year and how from there they developed their graduation projects.

They generously offer insights into their design research processes in relation to their personal goals and interests, and elaborate on the steps they took. Their reflections, one or two years in hindsight, show how important and formative this experience has been to them.

I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to speak with me, and I am looking forward to continuing this conversation at the department. Special thanks to Rana Ghavami, who has been a companion in seeing this publication through.

Centering methods, sensibilities and approaches of design practice

Rosa te Velde

Alice Twemlow

September 2021

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Research for/through/into design

Introduction

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1 https://www.kabk.nl/ onderzoek/lectorate-design

In this conversation we discuss distinctions between research for design, research into design, and research through design, which were first introduced by Christopher Frayling, professor of Cultural History at the Royal College of Art in his 1993 article ‘Research in Art and Design’. His influential, yet somewhat obscure categorisations, were inspired by art philosopher Herbert Read’s distinction between ‘teaching through art’ and ‘teaching to art’.2

2 Christopher Frayling ‘Research in Art and Design’, in: Royal College of Art Research Papers 1:1, 1993. Accessed through: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/384/3/frayling_ research_in_art_and_design_1993.pdf. See also Herbert Read, Education Through Art, 1944; Ken Friedman, ‘Research into, by and for design’, in: Journal of Visual Arts Practice 7:2, 2008.

Dr. Alice Twemlow is Lector (research professor) of Design/Research at KABK. With her lectorate, ‘Design and the Deep Future’ she aims to stimulate research around the particular theme of design’s fraught relationship to climate crisis but also, more generally, “to nurture a robust design-centred research culture” throughout the academy.1 As an associate professor in Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Alice supervises several PhDArts candidates in artistic research. From 2016 to 2018, Alice was the head of the Design Curating & Writing Master at Design Academy Eindhoven, and prior to this in 2008, she cofounded and directed the MFA in Design Criticism (D-Crit) and the MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism, at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Alice has an MA and PhD in History of Design from the Royal College of Art and the V&A Museum in London.

Interview – Alice Twemlow

Rosa: Some time ago, when you visited the Master Industrial Design department at KABK, I recall you said there is a clear distinction between design research and artistic research. How come and what is specific about design research?

(AT)

(RtV)

Alice: When I first arrived in the Netherlands, fresh from New York, where I perceived art and design to be quite separate, I was ready to defend a corner for design – I felt that it needed time to grow as a field distinct from artistic research. By now I feel they actually cohabit nicely. What I see at the PhDArts programme in Leiden is that, while applications of research might differ across specialisms, in fact, artists, designers, choreographers, dancers, and sonologists can still establish a common frame of reference through discussion on theory and methods. Plus there’s often confusion around the term design research because of the way it has been co-opted by industry and by market research. The archetypal example of this is IDEO, who have turned it into a bit of a formula,

the iconic image of which is a wall full of post-it notes.

What does that kind of design research entail exactly? How is it distinct from other types of ‘design research’?

(AT)

(RtV)

You can call it research for design. It deploys a lot of ethnographic and anthropological methods and techniques, such as participant observation and mapping of behavioural routes and patterns. The crudest way of putting it, is that it’s a recipe for how to go about designing stuff, and how to bring users and participants into the process. The design process can be very invisible, and difficult for clients to put their fingers on, but if they’re involved in the process, which is defined then as ‘design research’, their participation seems even more important as they are then considered not only consumers but also participants or even co-producers.

When I titled the Master programme at the School of Visual Arts in New York ‘Design Research’, people thought that we would be teaching the IDEO kind of stuff, and some of our students did end up working there. What I meant by ‘design research’, however, was something else. My students and I were doing research into design, reading into how, and trying to understand why, design – from its products, environments and infrastructures to its culture and values – is shaped the way it is.

The research techniques I was teaching my students there were pretty much derived from investigative journalism, so in fact we spent more time reading out beyond design, using design as a lens for interpreting some of the many political and social issues that it intersects.

Research for/through/into design

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What I am focused on now, here in the Netherlands, and in the context of artistic research, is more about how research might be conducted through design: Research through the

Most definitions of research include variations on the following: it’s a systematic approach to an inquiry and through it you aim to make an original contribution to knowledge, and make it available for debate and discussion with your publics. Part of this systematic approach is having a plan in which you frame a research question and determine a specific set of methods. It’s also about having a plan for how you will share the results of your research. What also distinguishes ‘scholarly’ research from the kind where you are gathering input for process, is that you have an intensified self-consciousness – an awareness of yourself preparing for, or being in the act of doing, research. And this awareness allows for documentation and reflection on that act of doing research which can feed back in to your project or can become available for others to engage with.

methods, sensibilities and approaches of the design practice itself.

(RtV)

Could we say that that research for design tends to exclude research from larger cultural, economic, historical discourses, as it happens in a setting where questions about who and for whom we can design are driven by commercial interests?

Yes, and this can also happen in education where design sometimes ends up being considered and taught only in terms of it being a profession or a vocation, rather than as a broader aspect of our culture, as one of the humanities or a liberal art, for example.

(RtV)

Do you think there is greater potential in the field of design for sharing research, since designers are inclined to deal with larger issues along with users, or a public?

Would you say that ‘theory’ is more important in research through design as opposed to research for design?

Possibly. Because in an educational or academic research setting, or in a practice that is funded by creative arts grants, you have very different commercial and time pressures than you do when working in a governmental or corporate sphere.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always necessary for every research through design project. Some people are just fundamentally empirical in what they do and don’t engage deeply with theory.

For those who do get into theory there can be a magical moment when they’re able to relate or juxtapose ideas with one another in a way that illuminates their work and allows them to understand the significance of their work in new ways. How they situate themselves in relation to design, suddenly becomes part of a much longer history. Theory helps you to understand that you’re not alone and you’re not the first – the concepts have been marinating for a long time!

(RtV)

(AT)

(AT)

(AT)

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Unfortunately, there’s often a sort of fear that they’ll be judged and that research, just like designed products, has to be perfect, complete and blackboxed before you show it to anyone. If you look at Industrial Design, since Modernism and the post-war drive for professionalisation (in the US and Western Europe anyway), the cultural norm is not to share, but rather to guard one’s intellectual property through copyrights and patents. Similarly, design research tends to be presented only at the end of a journey, as a paper, an article, a video or artefact. What I’m searching for are ways to make research public while it is in progress so there is room for others to contribute and as a way of making it more accessible and useful in an educational context.

Can you think of pedagogical formats to cultivate this culture?

How is the kind of research that feeds into the design process different from design research?

There is a kind of research that feeds into the design process that you might call the experimenting or the ‘gathering inspiration’ phase (the Pinterest mode). This kind of research is done in an intuitive way and in a very present way. You make something, you experiment with a material, or you collect a group of images, and respond very directly to the results that you’re seeing and you proceed by means of iteration. Often it’s best if the verbal brain is involved as little as possible.

(RtV)

(AT)

Interview – Alice Twemlow

(AT)

(RtV)

The culture of, and trust in a safe space for sharing can be built up in all facets of a department or academy. But in terms of research specifically, some of the things I recommend are: collective editing, peer-critiquing, regular sharing of works-in-progress, open-source archives of work and recipes. You could also create your own code of conduct within a course or department. For example, when commenting on a peer’s work, start with five positive things or things that stay with you, things that surprised you, before moving to five tips for improvement.

Research for/through/into design

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(RtV)

Sure!

(AT)

Can you say something about specific design research methods?

Some are imported from a different field and possibly tweaked and adapted for the purpose of design: interviewing or field research are examples of that. Other methods are native to design.

An example would be material research. At KABK many design students are interested in biopolymers. It’s a mix of science, cooking and textile experimentation, but I feel the research is guided by a design sensibility.

Then there is a whole set of digital methods; working with the internet as a kind of resource, archive, material, medium; as something to be scraped and filtered and sorted, clustered, categorised. There are many layers to it, because it’s about setting the parameters for gathering but also about analysing, interpreting and outputting. These kinds of methods are used in the Non Linear Narrative department for example. Their tutors include Lizzie Malcolm and Dan Powers of Rectangle who are experts in this kind of research. I am overwhelmed by the scale of the data that they’re working with – civilian casualties of international military actions or their album-cover-colour browsing tool that uses the whole of the iTunes database.

I think the probe, the prototype or the prop, is a nice example of a designerly research method. You might build something that is a bit weird or suggestive of a future value system, and put it in an existing situation. And what you gather 14

KABK, Design Lectorate, ‘Walking as a Research Method in Art and Design’, See: https://www.kabk.nl/en/lectorates/design/ kabinets-walking-as-a-method.

Generally, we could say we’re heading towards a more collaborative world where work is done in less individualistic ways. Of course there are many approaches to that. You could say, well, I’m an individual designer and I want to know a bit about a lot of different disciplines and integrate them into my work. Or you might say, I want to situate myself at an intersection of different disciplines and see how that shapes what I do. Or you say, I want to be collaborative in the sense that I totally and utterly respect the expertise of my neighbour and the participants in my community – we’re all equal – and we work together towards a common solution. I think the nuances that differentiate these approaches to collaboration need to be taught. And if collaborations of different kinds are indeed valued, then they need to be rewarded as such, meaning students might not be able to graduate individually but collectively. You might not be assessed by tutors, but rather by peers and by your community – your collaborators.

are reactions. It’s a way of surfacing insights. You could also make a scenario, build a whole world of context for your props.

Can I talk about what I’ve been working on lately?

3

(RtV)

The ways in which education is structured is still focused on the student and their individual trajectory. What is the importance of collaboration for research and how can education be structured to support it more fundamentally?

(RtV)

(AT)

I’ve been working on the method of walking, and how it is used in different ways by artists and designers in their research practices.3 You might wonder, what is the difference between just walking around and walking as research. What I’ve learned is that when it’s used in a self-aware way, to gather insights, or to gather data, in a sensory capacity, it becomes research. You might be gathering that data from around you, from the environment. For example, one Interior Architecture & Furniture Design student during a workshop with KCCM (Krijn Christiaansen and Cathelijne Montens) tried to walk along a river but he found he kept encountering obstacles of various kinds. His project became about enumerating and trying to understand his obstacles, what they were and what they meant, and then using that as data to feed into his project. Others use walking to heighten their focus on what’s going on inside them. It’s about how you are thinking, feeling and seeing as a result of where, and the way in which

(AT)

Interview – Alice Twemlow

• MFA Design Criticism, School of Visual Arts, New York, Exploding Footnotes: Design Research in Action, 2015.

Research for/through/into design

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you have chosen to walk. Walking can be seen as a research laboratory. I’ve always been an advocate of putting your body into the research; it often yields more unexpected and exciting results than if you stay behind your computer or your books. Lots of students are interested in using it and I’ve noticed it helps them to use the first person mode of address, when describing their research.

(RtV)

(AT)

Final question: what, according to you are urgent or important research topics or themes for Industrial Design?

My main one is looking at design’s complicity in planetary degradation, climate change and the loss of biodiversity. And when I say complicity, I mean developing a more nuanced understanding, and not doing this kind of quick blame game or quick demand for circularity or recycling, which I find very limiting. But this is evolving for me into something I’m more happy calling ‘climate justice’ or ‘environmental justice’, to underline that these issues are completely inseparable from the social issues that we face today. Industrial Design has a long, long way to go, in repairing damages from its glory years.

There’s plenty of work to be done there, and it’s not all just doom and gloom; this work can be exciting, generative. For this work, and for other topics, I hope Industrial Design will continue to use an industrial process, material, technique or object to root itself, but I hope it won’t be constrained by old measures of value such as form and function and that it gives itself permission and time to explore and intervene in contemporary social issues. To me, one interesting way forward for Industrial Design would be to undo or unlearn the kind of professionalism that has been its defining identity so far. To embrace provisionality, ad-hoc approaches and iteration – to consider its products less as final entities and more as probes and props that can provoke discourse, elicit knowledge, invite participation, and remain in a state of collective becoming.

(AT)

The head, the heart, the hand and the eye Employing artistic research sensibilities in design

Saskia van Stein 16

Interview – Alice Twemlow

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1 https://www.designacademy. nl/p/study-at-dae/masters/ critical-inquiry-lab

Since September 2019, Saskia van Stein has been the head of the Critical Inquiry Lab, a Master programme at Design Academy Eindhoven founded in 2016, formerly known as Design Curating & Writing. This department was established to support a growing practice of writing and publishing on design and to bridge the gap between design practice and theory. Previously Saskia was the director of Bureau Europa, a platform for architecture and design in Maastricht.

At the Critical Inquiry Lab, students are encouraged “to develop a design practice driven by artistic research”.1 In this conversation Saskia elaborates on how she understands ‘design research’ and how it is taught at her department.

Rosa: You started two years ago as the head of the Master, which you renamed as the Critical Inquiry Lab. What were your aims for this programme?

(SvS)

Saskia: The question which was posed to me by the Design Academy Eindhoven artistic director Joseph Grima was if I could integrate research into the core of the practice and the department.

When I started writing the curriculum, I aimed to not reproduce myself and my way of looking onto the world, but rather wanted to provide a thriving environment for students to develop a design attitude they can call their own in order to anticipate and prepare themselves for an unknown future. The challenges we’re up against are enormous and 60% of the jobs we need in a decade or so have yet to be designed.

Let’s delve into the question of ‘design research’: what is it and why is it needed?

(SvS)

(RtV)

(RtV)

How I understand research as design, is to investigate and explore with curiosity the potential of spaces and places where changes and alternatives could manifest. We are living through a paradigm shift when it comes to leaving the 20th century behind and opening up to the potential of the 21st century. This potential has to do with the acceleration of information, which is rooted in technology, but also the urgencies spurred by climate change and other forms of inequality and injustice – how to be a human in a world that’s changing rapidly? We need thorough

analyses of the codes that have historically been inscribed into the designed environment and society at large. We have to take on the responsibility of

reflecting upon what design as research can add in terms of finding space for change, similar to how a poet finds new spaces in between the words, new correlations and relations, in order to work towards a more equitable future.

You use the terms research as design and design as research.

The words we use to label things are important, and sometimes confusing. What is the reason why you use these terms instead of ‘design research’?

(SvS)

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Interview – Saskia van Stein

(RtV)

The common understanding is that all design has research at its core. This drinking glass, a serially produced product, was once sand, and it was industrialised into this shape and form, which required research at different phases of the process, ranging from material extraction, to design of the object and production processes. But to me design as research and research understood as design is closer to investigative journalism than it is to the production of iconographic imagery and object-making. It’s a

The head, the heart, the hand and the eye

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matter of attitude. I always use the two: research as design and design as research. On the one hand, one can understand

Back to the question of artistic research, what is the difference between artistic research and design research?

research as something that is fuelled by a curiosity or inquisitive trajectory, which can then become an essay, or a strategy, which can take any shape or form to open up new domains of potentiality. On the other hand, it is about looking through the (historical) lens of design and trying to understand contemporary culture at large.

I prioritise theoretical and societal questions that are beyond the classical field of design so the focus is not on the industry per se. But what do I mean by design? That is a an ongoing question for me. In the era of ‘post-design’ we should break through the object and broaden our understanding from the designer as the facilitator of aesthetics, efficiency, functionality and affordability.

Today, the designer’s role has expanded, it entails connecting the material with the immaterial and the way we produce and organise our processes.

(RtV)

(SvS)

between the head and the heart, the hand and the eye, between intuition and cognition, is where we want

(SvS)

(RtV)

We introduce students to methodology in the classical sense of the word by introducing them to techniques used to identify, question and analyse information about a topic, process or system. But our aim is to empower students to rely upon the tools they have, in order for them to find a method that is close to them, from which they can recognise their own approach and use of tools as research.

We ask students how they look, and how they think as researchers.

We encourage them to question everything while postponing judgement in order to encourage them to lean into alternative research methods themselves.

Earlier you asked me if we will keep the name for the Master at KABK as ‘Industrial Design’. For now we will, but it’s always a discussion and causes some confusion.

What do you think about when you hear the name Industrial Design?

(SvS)

to depart from. Building upon this, assignments are given related to critical theory, design theory, material culture, along with skills such as producing video documentaries or making radio programmes so students start to feel comfortable with speaking their mind and speaking out loud. It’s about trusting different modes of engagement rather than only the thought process. The research briefs oscillate between theory and practice, between the body and mind, and the self and the other.

Over the course of the first year the brief starts with the body and ends with the planetary reality. Students are invited to design with ‘entities’ that are non-human or more-than-human. For example, they are currently designing for the wind. What if the wind had agency?

20

I can perhaps explain the difference by posing a question: Can you measure how solid your methodology is, or, is your research founded upon an artistic position which we know from the fine arts? It has to do with the vocabulary we have as designers. Visualising research, and introducing new narratives, occurs more in the artistic realm than the scientific realm. I shy away from the idea that design is solely appreciated for its problem-solving capacity.

Earlier you talked about the idea of students developing their own methodology. Could you give some examples?

Can you elaborate on the role that research has in your programme and how you teach it?

Within our Master programme, artistic research is the DNA. We provide the context for students to find their own tone, voice, and position in how they as a designer want to articulate their practice, which context situates their knowledge and with whom their thinking has a kinship. At a time when hierarchies and knowledge are scrutinised in design, and the ideologies behind Western value and belief systems are questioned, we emphasise the reconnection to the body. Our students partake in singing and dancing classes in order to have a somatic relationship with their body and themselves again. This might sound somewhat abstract, but it is a beautiful beginning to the two-year course. It invites you to reappreciate the relation you have with yourself as a whole with all your senses. This correlation

(RtV)

Interview – Saskia van Stein

(SvS)

(RtV)

When I think of a Master entitled Industrial Design I initially think of the Industrial Revolution and modernism, which introduced scale, the division of labour and the designer as we know it. I also think of (technological) innovation and the rise of the commodity. The understanding of design by a broader audience is also rooted within Industrial Design, so the designer is tied to the process of production and industrialisation, and as a result, also to the logic of the market.

This is rooted in quite problematic and disempowering forces.

Industrialisation, as we understand it in the context of globalisation, is a way of redistributing power relations. We still extract

material and labour power from certain areas in the world and move it elsewhere. I feel we should revisit the colonial mechanisms of modernity that perpetuate these industrial systems. The industrial designer is rooted in this. What we have come to know as the ‘Dutch designer’ aims to go beyond this by appropriating the visual vocabulary, agency, and attitude of The head, the heart, the hand and the eye

21

the artist, which led to the ‘star designer’. The object becomes the synthesis of societal critique but nevertheless, as I see it, ‘Dutch design’ is still very much rooted in that tradition of Industrial Design.

(RtV)

What do you think industrial designers and students should be working on right now?

It’s a huge question and I don’t consider myself an expert on Industrial Design. Yet as far as I’m concerned we need to re-design the way the industry functions, rethink what we consider as industrial, and establish links to technological networks, different knowledge systems, and question our ways of being. The world as we know it is unsettled. For example, the Netherlands is such a small country and yet the secondlargest exporter of food. This is unsustainable. We have to redesign our food and distribution systems. These are complex questions for which political choices must be made. We still design and reflect on these questions through the lens of the industry, which I think we should re-visit. What is an industry?

Where are things produced? Who produces them? And on what scale? This should be the premise of the conversation whether we like it or not. We live in a reality where ecology and climate, and to a larger extent societal inequality, demands of us to address these matters, and to search for different values.

How have you worked through such vast and complex framings in your curriculum? It seems to be quite challenging, maybe even impossible to integrate all of this in your course.

(SvS) (SvS)

Change will only happen with the help of politics and industry. Returning to food as an example, many Dutch

farmers have made investments which can only be earned back over two generations. In the Netherlands, on average, we only spend 10% of our income on food while our production surplus doesn’t incentivise farmers elsewhere to farm. Might a redesign of a monetary system for instance instigate the kind of change which could better the situation of the farmer, nature and (planetary) society at large?

(RtV)

pushing them aside. It’s important to know for example, about the deindustrialisation and the rise of the consumer society in the 1960s or 1970s in the Netherlands, and it is important to know how the Arts and Crafts came from the United Kingdom to the European mainland. And acknowledging that this came with a particular ideology, which is rooted in a worldview that is predominantly white, male, and Eurocentric, with all its racist and gender discriminatory consequences.

(RtV)

It’s tricky as we are searching for a new balance. We have many conversations about things going on in the news, on social media, and on how to read into the populist rise in the Dutch context and beyond. The societal division is troubling yet we should not undermine that the Netherlands is still a fairly transparent and open nation. It’s in our DNA to be on the one hand quite entrepreneurial and on the other hand, to cynically question everything – ourselves, our community, our cities. It’s a very interesting and productive position to begin with as a designer. It’s not cynicism bordering on nihilism, but it’s also not producing for production-sake.

I think a challenging balance of historical input and enabling students to find the tools and vocabulary that will help them to develop resilient and ‘agile’ practices, by which I don’t mean ‘flexible’ in an economic or opportunistic sense. I think the designer of the future has to have agility in order to operate because we don’t really know where we are heading. I don’t know if that’s a proper answer!

It seems you find it important to stress local and historical knowledge, as well as knowledge of the origins of the discipline of the (Industrial) Design. How come?

Most of our students are not from the Netherlands and even many of them are not from the European context. They come to the Netherlands to study design, so in that sense they are in our cultural reality for two years. We are in a societal moment where we are acknowledging the problematic issues of our own cultural heritage and the systems ‘we’ have inherited. These things are happening simultaneously with a fundamental redefinition of the design discipline itself, and to me, it’s about acknowledging and incorporating those histories and not 22

(SvS)

Interview – Saskia van Stein

The head, the heart, the hand and the eye

23

When it comes to teaching, I keep on stating from which perspective I speak, and we regularly organise student feedback on the programme. We need to bear in mind that

context, class, gender, schooling, experiences, orientation and race inform our ways of relating to the world, and therefore, we tie different realities within those two years. This is also mirrored through the curriculum and the tutors I engage. Our team is very engaged. They bring in questions and perspectives on these questions drawing upon their disciplinary background as well as their sexual orientation, schooling, and ethnicity. They mirror a field with critical appreciation for local history, contributing differing perspectives from their positions.

(SvS)

Drawing on ‘all your relations’

Research as a way to check assumptions and ethics

Dori Tunstall 24

Interview – Saskia van Stein

25

Dr. Dori (Elisabeth) Tunstall is a US-born design anthropologist. After obtaining her MA in Anthropology and a PhD from Stanford University, Dori worked in advertising and for marketing companies, incorporating ethnographic research methods in order to better understand how people experience designed objects, before returning to academia and design education. Among many other things, she was an Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at Swinburne University in Australia. As the Dean of the Design Faculty at Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCAD University) in Toronto, Canada, she has implemented reforms in order to decolonise design education by, among other things, cluster-hiring indigenous staff and people of colour, as well as changing the curriculum and centering what she calls ‘respectful design’.

She is interested in understanding how design translates values into tangible experiences. In this conversation we speak about what design research can learn from anthropology.

Rosa: How does your background as an anthropologist translate to design?

(DT)

Interview – Dori Tunstall

Dori: I’m a classically trained anthropologist. Traditionally, anthropology has been seen to have four fields: physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and social and cultural anthropology.

Physical anthropology is a field of inquiry that studies the human body or the bodies of other animals and pre-humans. It is a field that I always tie very closely to Industrial Design because when you start looking at the practices of ergonomics, you start to look at some of the practices of usability. Linguistics is about language and how language evolves over time and space. It’s a field that I closely relate to graphic design because it relates to the visual communication of languages and messages. Archaeology in anthropology studies human remains and all things over time and space, but in anthropology we tend to focus on the human part.

Both are closely related to Industrial Design when you think of artefacts and design before it was ‘industrialised’. What’s important to the field of design is the work that anthropologists do around the morphology and the change of forms over time and space.

Lastly, I look at social and cultural anthropology from the perspective of design. People make things in order to communicate, and one of my favourite books that I always use to teach research methods is Thinking with Things by Esther Pasztory, who is an anthropologist and art-historian.

What I find very powerful, and which still influences my way of thinking, is the notion that aesthetics are our first technology of control. Aesthetics is the way in which we try to control our relationships with the natural world, and how we try to control our social relationships.

How do you unpack these relationships through research?

How to do research into the aesthetics and their relation to the social organisation and the power structures that control them?

(DT)

26

(RtV)

(RtV)

You should always be doing research to make sure that the assumptions around your decisions will not have harmful effects. Aesthetic decisions are being made because design has power in the world, because it can control social relations, because it can affect our relationship not only to the natural world but also the supernatural world – the things that we can’t see. Research allows you to address that process with a greater sense of intentionality and a greater sense of what the potential outcomes of those decisions are.

Drawing on ‘all your relations’

27

(RtV)

Would you say doing research as a designer is about ethics?

Yes. And I’d say also morality! Research helps you check your ethics, to check your assumption that “this is going to be extremely helpful in the entire world!”.

(RtV)

Let’s say my assumption is that it is more cloudy in the spring than in the summer in Toronto, which is going to affect the way in which I design an umbrella, for example. What are the almanacs that exist that say how many days of sunshine there are in the month of May in Toronto? Maybe I should do some observation, so I start counting and every day I take a photo of the sky in May. Then I decide maybe I should talk to some people, and I’ll start doing interviews or I’ll start doing a survey. I collect more and more data to ground my assumption: What do people say, what people do, what do people feel? The next step is, what is the evidence I need in order to convince others, because if I want to make this intervention I need to convince other people that this is sound and it makes sense. And then, I ask who am I talking to, who do I want to have conversations with? If I’m talking to my mom, that’s going to be very different, I can show my pretty observation photos and she will be like “yeah that’s great!” If I’m talking to a scientist, then I might need to show the almanac data that is related to the weather temperature that is set for each day, and I might need different evidence for them.

The way students present their projects take different forms.

When we do ‘final presentations’, I say let’s not do presentations, let’s do performances. In some ways, you’re performing an experience that is meant to move people intellectually, emotionally, and generate some sort of action in a group of people that you want to embrace. I put emphasis on the performance, which can also just be a slideshow presentation. The (written) documentation is supplementary, it’s never worth more points than the presentation or object. And that’s part of decolonisation for me:

(DT)

Could you distinguish different phases in the research process?

There are a couple of ways to break it down. One of the frameworks that I use to help students understand research, is QAME: questions, assumptions, methods, and evidence. I actually made a music video to explain QAME!1 QAME is based on the anthropologist Alan Barnard’s framework as outlined in his book History and Theory in Anthropology (2000).

It starts with defining what your research question is.

It’s important that it’s a question, because it should represent something you don’t know! You have to be on this journey of going from not knowing to knowing more. Then, what I talk about with designers is, “What is the intervention you want to make in the world? What is it that you want to change for the better, and for whom?” Is it a ‘how’, a ‘when’, a ‘what’ or a ‘who’ question? Is your question related to exploratory research or is meant to understand a specific phenomenon? Are you just exploring this, are you trying to generate new ideas, are you evaluating something that already exists with the intention of trying to make it better? Secondary research becomes really important because it helps to understand if other people have asked this question before: “Did they already answer my question, and if so, do I have to create another question?”

You’re wanting to see what other people know about

(DT)

moving away from logo-centricity as the only or the preferred mode of interaction, communication

this idea, this approach, this thing you’re trying to understand in the world. When I teach research

28

How do you then guide students into making an intervention or design project from this research phase?

1 See: QAME Song, https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W64e8xhvra4.

methods, the first output that we do is what I call a ‘visual annotative bibliography’. References show who you’re in conversation with, so that other people can say “I want to join in on that conversation” or “there’s a more interesting conversation that’s happening here you should probably bring that into your conversation”.

After this, you move to assumptions. You have your own experiences, intentions, and interventions. What’s important is that you make them clear and apparent for yourself and for others. Select methods that will ground your assumptions in some kind of reality, and some kind of data. You might start with secondary research, and then tie it to that assumption.

Secondary research is not just about looking at journal articles, it could be looking at existing products.

and engagement.

Interview – Dori Tunstall

(DT)

(RtV)

Even when formulating a question I’m already asking what the intervention is you want to make. In the process of doing research, you are thinking about the design decisions you’re having to make.

How concept and research work together is that the concept should be an answer to one or many of the things that you’ve discovered in the process of doing research, and now you’re giving it a tangible form.

The challenge is to not jump ahead of the research. You have assumptions, so every idea that you have, you should be willing to put down, you just shouldn’t be wedded to your ideas. You have to filter out some ideas that are not aligned with the intention of the goal and audience that you’re wanting to embrace.

Drawing on ‘all your relations’

29

(RtV)

Many of my design students have been told that research is hard and that they can’t do it. But it is just like all of the stuff that you do on an everyday basis in order to live and evaluate your own world, so it’s not a high-level expertise that you have to have.

(RtV)

understanding the ethical impact not just on yourself and your users, but on all of those who will be affected by you putting the product out into the world.

You make it sound doable and easy!

(DT)

Design practice, especially in the Netherlands is still very much related to the modernist project. Could you speak a bit more about your attempts to ‘decolonise design’ and ‘design research’ specifically?

What I did this year during a graduate research methods course, was to put every methodology in dialogue with indigenous writers and thinkers. What are the differences between doing a structured interview versus doing a sharing circle where everyone holds the stick that can be passed? What are the affordances of one versus the other, in terms of the kinds of outcomes that can be generated?

With the structured interview, you get more information that addresses your research question, but it can be stressful for the participants as well as the interviewers. With the sharing circle, you feel more intimate and get more stories rather than just answers.

We talked about how in many indigenous cultures you learn from observing in a different way than in for example, commercial design research. You learn what the weather patterns are by observing the birds and animals. You learn how to do something by watching someone do something and then they make you do errands to learn what to fetch or use, without asking questions but just through watching and observing. Asking a question says “I’m entitled to that knowledge,” whereas if you observe, listen and follow, and if you do something wrong they may just gently correct you so you’ve learned in that moment.

What is the kind of empathy that you can build when you follow, and not just by watching it on some remote camera or having some sensors provide you with some remote data as to what’s going on? For example, bees are sensors for telling us what’s going on in our environment just as computer chips provide us with information on what’s going on. The difference is that bees don’t provide the information in a number at the end of that knowledge journey.

We also drew deeply on the notion of ‘all my relations’, so that the research is not human-centred. What effect does your research have on the water, the air, the land, the animals, the plants, and everything else. Why are you doing this research and what for? For the questions and assumptions in the research, in terms of indigenous ways of knowing and decolonisation , it is really about how the research framework sits outside of human-centeredness, 30

How do you observe not just through the eyes, but through the ears, the body, and how the body feels? How are you truly present in your observation? If one of the approaches of colonisation is the separation of the mind and the body, then bringing that together in your observational practices is part of the way in which you decolonise that method.

This is what you call ‘old ways of knowing’?

(DT)

(DT)

Interview – Dori Tunstall

(RtV)

Yes. The saddest part of our understanding of colonisation as a particular phenomenon that came out of Europe, is that indigenous practices are just the practices of the people of the land who are connected and understand their obligations to the land. And by understanding their sense of place to the land, they understand the relationships and their sense of place with others. That was the knowledge of the world.

There’s something that happened in the culture of Europe that began to pull away from that. I always put the locus of this shift in what happened with the European aristocracy, where this notion of the separation of the land – “I’m off in my castle somewhere and there are peasants who work the land, and they are who I consider to be lower to me” – which then led to the separation between the people and their land, and all of the obligations that come from being part of that wholeness of the land and environment.

Going back to ‘all my relations’ and the connectivity and obligation to place, understanding all the things that are part of that place is part of decolonising our mindsets and approaches.

By doing that, we create space for indigenous peoples to take back their sovereignty over the land which has been taken from them through that process of settlers coming from one place to build a better life for themselves on the land of someone else, and through the labour of someone else so that they can live like the aristocracy.

Drawing on ‘all your relations’

31

This is where the responsibility of design, and especially of product and Industrial Design becomes so important because what we need to change is our aspirations. We still live in a society, and I say a colonial society, where our notion

of a ‘good life’ is based on the lifestyle of the medieval aristocrat. When we begin to design, and this is

(DT)

where the research helps, we must question ‘what is a good life’? A good life is based on a product that keeps me in connection with all the things that are around me. A good life is a set of interactions that deepen my knowledge of the land. That make me present and connected. Those are the two values in any design.

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Interview – Dori Tunstall

Research at the crossroads

33

Investigative journalism and/as design research

1

(YS)

34

Interview – Yassine Salihine

Natasha Jen: 'Design Thinking Is Bullsh*t', 99U Conference 2017, New York. See: https://99u.adobe. com/videos/55967/natasha-jendesign-thinking-is-bullshit.

the department in 2012, when it was still the Postgraduate Course Industrial Design. With a background in journalism, Yassine has for a long time been interested in research, and in incorporating multiple layers into his work as a designer. When the Postgraduate Course transformed into a master programme in 2017, he was asked to come and develop and teach design research.

It sounds like ‘design research’ circulates in different spheres, and has many different interpretations and practices. Alice also mentioned the ‘Post-it’ type of research, which she refers to as research for design. How do you relate to this?

2

Yassine Salihine graduated from

(RtV)

Yassine: A couple of years ago, I realised that the biannual Research Through Design conference took place in Delft.1 It’s a conference with researchers from all over the world, featuring many great projects. I noticed many of the people I spoke to were surprised to hear that I was a designer, as most of the participants were academics. Many of them use design to produce knowledge in the form of a research paper, rather than a product. For example, they create prototypes or lab settings to test smart technologies, understand interactions and human behaviour. I remember a conversation in which one of the participants shared his observation that designers, when conducting research, relapse into using specific, academic jargon and act like psychologists or philosophers, whereas they as designers doing research have their own skillsets and could take the freedom to create their own imagery and language. It was interesting to witness this conversation, which to me came as a surprise, as research to me is always about working towards an outcome. It seems as if research through design, or at least in the context of this conference, prototyping and testing in order to produce knowledge has become singled out to become a field of its own. To me, the designer is someone who acts, creates, and intervenes in the world by materialising something. Research through design should be integrated into the research process; making prototypes, bringing them into a context to find out how people interact with them, in order to discern assumptions, and what needs to be improved in the next steps. In other words, to me it’s important that research serves the design process, but it’s not the final station.

http://researchthrough design.org/2019/

Teaching design research (1)

Rosa: How do you understand design research? Alice Twemlow makes a distinction between research for, into and through design. She stresses the importance of developing research through design at KABK – through the “methods, sensibilities and approaches of the design practice”.

(YS)

(RtV)

For me, this is very much connected to ‘design thinking’, which I find quite limiting. In class, I often show this short lecture by Natasha Jen called ‘Design Thinking is Bullsh*t’.2 She says that design thinking has become too much of a format, which reduces the design process to a single tool: the Post-it. She explains how the five steps of design thinking follow a linear process: ‘empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test’, but it lacks the bigger, critical questions of evaluating if something is needed or good at all.

According to her, “design thinking packages a designer’s way

Investigative journalism and/as design research

35

I also like to introduce an exercise at the beginning of the year, in which I ask students simple questions about their favourite food, country, colour, sound and shape. It’s a quick assignment and they are asked to write down their top-of-mind associations. I then ask them to list the opposites, or the antagonists of their favourite things, and to design something using this as a framework. It’s important to be aware of your preferences and biases. We all have our own personal perspective, which is fine, but when I look forward, I cannot see what is behind me – it requires an active move in order to turn around.

Can you say a bit more about your own methods of conducting research? How does your background in journalism influence the way in which you work?

How does it influence the way in which you teach design research?

As a journalist I always question: what is the status quo? How did the status quo come into existence? If you understand how and why something developed the way it did, you cannot stick to the idea that “things just are the way they are”. If you know how something came about, you can understand that the future could look differently. As a designer, this is crucial to understand.

When writing a piece, I follow the journalistic principles of understanding the different dimensions of a story: the who, where, what, why, and how. Last year, I translated this into an assignment in which students were randomly assigned different textiles and we worked through these questions. One student was assigned a duvet, and made a biography of the duvet as if it were a living person, in order to understand how it became what it is now. We then looked at where the down that was used for the duvet came from. This is an example of how I integrate these questions into my classes.

(RtV)

Ibid.

(RtV)

3

of working for a non-designer audience by codifying their processes into a prescriptive, step-by-step approach to creative problem solving”.3 She traces the origins of how these ideas came into existence which is a useful way to show how terms and practice originate in a specific context. There is not one way of doing research.

When I teach, I always share the disclaimer, ‘this is how I do things’, in order to encourage students to find their own ways. There is not one method, but sometimes it’s good to bring one framework to the table, so that students can work with it.

(YS)

A critique of mainstream journalism is that it commonly presents reporting as if it were neutral. Dutch television broadcaster NOS is notorious for ‘framing’, for leaving out information, for using certain terms that alter the meaning and interpretation of a news event. How do you implement an awareness of subjectivity and framing and how do you challenge the idea of ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’?

One of the golden principles in journalism is that one source is no source. You need to check and double-check your sources, include multiple perspectives and reveal your sources, which is why using footnotes and references are important; it reveals the perspective of your source.

36

(YS)

Interview – Yassine Salihine

Investigative journalism and/as design research

37

Theory in practice

Rosa: When students and tutors enter an educational programme, there are different expectations – different ideas when it comes to what the field of (industrial) design should be, what design practice is, what design research entails or what a thesis should be. In my experience, many people experience a lot of pressure and are intimidated by the idea of having to write, and by theory and research more broadly.

What, for you, are some ways to overcome this? How do you do this in your classes?

Teaching design research (2)

(SH)

Shailoh Phillips has a background

in cultural anthropology, philosophy, interaction design and arts education. In 2020-2021, she tutored the students in the first year of the Master programme Industrial Design. Currently, she is also developing a new pedagogical training for teachers at KABK. She is often hired as a ‘theory’ teacher, but is interested in blurring and overcoming the distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. How does she go about a ‘theory class’ and what is the importance of ‘making’ to research?

38

Interview – Shailoh Phillips

Theory in practice

(RtV)

Shailoh: Do you know the parable of the blind man and the elephant? A group of blind people encounter an elephant. They return to their village and try to explain this creature to their fellow villagers, who have never seen an elephant. One had felt its flapping ears and said the elephant was similar to a curtain.

Another, said no, the elephant is like a tree trunk, having only touched its legs. Another one had felt the tail, and compared it to a rope. The communication problem occurs because they don’t have a shared frame of reference, and therefore they draw on analogies to past experiences. The same goes for education and for the division between practice and theory. A lot of confusion arises by not having a shared vocabulary, or by using the same words in different ways. One of the things I find important is that students find ‘the zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky), expanding from what they already know and feel comfortable with and building from there. Naming, recognising and listing the methods that they are already using helps them understand that what they’ve been doing is already ‘research’, that there are ideas embedded in objects, and things are not always used according to their design.

One way of bridging the gap is ‘critical making’. It’s a container term that has gained popularity over the past years.

‘Critical making’ was introduced by Matt Ratto in 2008 and developed by Garnet Hertz, among others, in Canada, in courses on technology and design in the humanities. The idea was that you can discuss Wi-Fi networks, electronics and ethics, but you need hands-on engagement in order to develop a better understanding of what is at stake. The world doesn’t exist of words, but of bricks and wood, of cables and code, and if you want to understand the world and change it, you need to engage with these materialities. This points back to Marxist theories of material determinism; material conditions define our social condition.

Philosopher Bruno Latour has written a lot about technodeterminism and the ‘agency’ of objects. His speedbump example where he describes it as a ‘sleeping policeman’, which replaces a sign telling you what the maximum speed is and instead imposes behaviour on you, is well-known. From this example, 39

we can think of assignments for students that impose a moral choice onto the user. In this way, theory is brought to life when you’re put into the position of the maker, working through the way in which ideologies are embedded in objects.

(RtV)

Can you say a bit more about ‘critical making’ and how you implement this in your classes?

1 http://www. conceptlab.com/cards

(SH)

2 Garnet Hertz, referencing Matt Ratto, in: Garnet Hertz, ‘What is critical making?’, see: https://current.ecuad. ca/what-is-critical-making.

3

Ibid.

Garnet Hertz has written extensively on critical making. He has produced zines and card games that offer prompts, for example, something like, what does Facebook look like for ants in the seventeenth century?1 According to him, “critical making is an elision of two typically disconnected modes of engagement in the world – ‘critical thinking,’ often considered as abstract, explicit, linguistically based, internal and cognitively individualistic; and ‘making,’ typically understood as material, tacit, embodied, external and community-oriented.”2 Critical making is connected to critical design and speculative design, but there are some differences.3 What is important for me, is that with some questions, you simply cannot wrap your head around them in an abstract way. You need embodied engagement. What I do for example, when reading a text, is to find an appropriate environment for it. Or when I gave a lecture, as I did during the first year project we did together with archaeologist Maikel Kuijpers in Leiden in which we engaged materials, I asked students to collect five objects in advance. One that is meaningful, one that is massproduced, one that is handmade, one that is organic; and one that is thrown away. These objects are helpful in creating a frame of reference for design, and given that the students collect these objects themselves, there’s a difference in how we are able to engage in a discussion.

(RtV)

and prototyping? And thirdly, why? What are relevant issues or topics that are part of investigations, projects and experiments that take place in the workshops?

There is vast knowledge within making processes, but workshop coordinators, who are specialised, are often overlooked, positioning their material knowhow as inferior in power and also in pay scale. This project was an attempt to broaden our idea of where research takes place, in order to make it more inclusive, revaluing the technical and craft knowledge as related to ideas and urgencies. For example, in the textiles workshop, grappling with ecological issues and the tremendous waste in the fashion industry brought people to making entirely new nonwoven materials and design methods. This is not a practice that happened on paper, rather repurposing a paper shredder to recycle discarded scraps into new materials. Theory takes place in practice, and it takes practice to be able to recognise, name and reflect on the relationships between words and things.

4

You’ve been involved with various projects that blur the division between theory and practice through critical making, for example through the workgroup Material Practices.4 You also worked on a project at the Willem de Kooning Academy, where you looked at the ways in which research is done in the workshops. Could you tell us about this?

40

(SH)

https://making-matters.nl

In the research project ‘How We Make Research’ at Willem de Kooning Academy, I questioned what research is and where it takes place in the workshops. How do we ‘make research’?

I interviewed all the workshop coordinators and asked them three things. Firstly, what tools, machines and techniques are available and how is the equipment used? Secondly, how do making and research interrelate? How are making processes documented and communicated through, for example, sketching

Interview – Shailoh Phillips

Theory in practice

41

Honor Newman attended the MA Industrial Design programme at KABK from 2018-2020. She used the research semester to explore a wide variety of methods. Her thesis was a video essay titled ‘DESCENDANTS’, which then evolved into an interactive installation called The Human Hack.

After meeting a ‘body modder’ in a bar in Brighton during the summer before embarking upon her final study year in 2020, Honor became interested in the world of body enhancement and biohacking. “It started off with a focus on a subculture called ‘grinding’, which describes people who use cybernetics to hack their bodies. I talked with various people engaged in ‘grinding’, and after visiting a body modding shop in Utrecht I had an RFID implanted in my body. Meeting the transhumanist Christie was important for my research, as she introduced me to various sources and possible trajectories. In reading texts, I was interested in understanding the social impact of human enhancement. My method was quite unstructured as I wanted to see what works for me. I took on a quite adventurous and explorative way of researching: I followed my feet. I wanted to see where the research took me rather than structure it like I would with a normal project.”

interviews with human subspecies from the future, I looked into the politics associated with them for which I created four exaggerated characters.”

Honor is quite critical of the way she translated the many layers of this research into a graduation project. “I zoomed in on one specific type of enhancement while I wanted to make it particularly relevant to the present. I ended up looking at machine-learning, genomics and genetics, but what I struggled with was developing a clear message, as I didn’t want my opinion to be drastically foregrounded. My position was more ambiguous. I finally developed a live machine-learning interactive installation, which first took images of the audience members, and then through StyleGAN (a type of machine learning) created faces from them and projection-mapped them onto sculptures. This created a sort of eerie effect, which wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to achieve. I see it now as an ‘awareness installation’ and feel that the research process was the most successful part for me.”

After collecting data, attending conferences, conducting interviews, doing embodied research, as well as literature reviews and scraping the internet for visuals, Honor had to find a way to deal with all the research she had gathered and developed.

“As I was dealing with complex ethical questions, I wasn’t quite sure where I stood. I used speculative storytelling as a research method to tell and envision how we would enhance ourselves into different subspecies. Storytelling became my primary method. The creative writing helped me to evoke my deep thoughts and to process them. I attended many biohacker meetups, impressive presentations, conferences, meetups with philosophers. For my thesis, I compiled all of this into a story, which became a video essay. Through speculative 42

Honor Newman

n a m

ew N r o n Ho The Human Hack

43

((b o d y mo

EXPLORATIVE PHASE

OCTOBER

SUMMER

DESIGN RESEARCH difi cation)

)

((A I ))

( ( b i o ha

met a body modder (Eli) in a bar in Brighton who introduced me to the world of ‘grinding’

g ))

< INFORMAL ENCOUNTERS + CONVERSATIONS < EMBODIED EXPERIMENTS

visited hacker forum Beyond Human visited conference (Brave New World) met ‘transhumanist’ Christy

DESIGN RESEARCH PRESENTATION

biohacking/technology Peter Paul Verbeek Michael Bess Michael J Sandall Nick Bostrom blogs/news articles

MATERIALISATION

< INTERVIEWS + FIELD RESEARCH

attended biohacker meet-ups

< SEMINARS + LECTURES

collected videos of body modders from Youtube/Reddit

< INTERNET SCRAPING FOR VISUAL CONENT < READING/LITERATURE REVIEWS < COLLECTION OF DATA

wrote stories about four different fictional characters who all had their own politics & belief systems

‘DESCENDANTS’

< SPECULATIVE STORYTELLING

< VIDEO ESSAY (Interview format)

installation using AI machine learning projection mapped onto sculptures

GRADUATION PROJECT

DECEMBER JANUARY

in c k i ng ) ) e-l ea r n n i h c a ( (m

visited a body modding shop in Utrecht and tried out cybernetics under my skin (via dangerousthings.com)

attended Peter Joosten (public speaker/podcast future thinking at his lecture and interviewed him

JUNE- (SEPT)

TRAJECTORY HONOR

< INSTALLATION

‘The Human Hack’

44

Honor Newman

The Human Hack

45

Sandipan Nath graduated from the MA Industrial Design programme at KABK in 2020. He wrote a thesis on non-human perspectives and ‘relationality’ before graduating with an audiovisual installation titled Interference 53°N, 42°E. For Sandipan, one of the goals of his graduation project was to figure out how he could develop a theoretical research into a graduation project, while drawing upon his skills in coding and engineering.

Throughout the research semester, Sandipan read lots of texts that grappled with concepts and theories on the notion of ‘hyperobjects’. “For me, the research semester was meant to develop the groundwork, so that I could put it to use in the second semester. My intention was to create different approaches. When it comes to writing I have some confidence, but my challenge is to then develop something out of it. Parallel to the texts by philosophers and theorists, I looked at projects and read texts by contemporary artists, as they helped me to better understand how they materialise questions and ideas on ‘hyperobjects’ into design and artistic work. Throughout the research phase my questions were: How do I take this research to the next phase?”

Sandipan’s research interest involved from ‘environment as an hyperobject’, object-oriented ontology, the perspective of non-humans, to the topic of interspecies. “The title I came up with was ‘Rethinking Relationality’, as I was researching and writing on this relation between humans and non-humans.

Why do the prevalent cultural and political frameworks of today lack a deepening perspective on the relationship between human and non-human entities? The format of my thesis was quite ‘academic’.”

Next Nature Network and the Multispecies Salon – which has an amazing archive of published texts and references.

I also attended sessions at the Reading Room, run by artist Sissel Marie Tonn, where I met the lawyer, writer and climate activist Laura Burgers (University of Amsterdam). She fights for climate justice through legislation and policies. I interviewed her and she introduced me to the Embassy of the North Sea. Sometimes you have to be lucky. This really helped me to turn my research, readings and interviews into a graduation project. From that point on, I focused on sound pollution in the underwater world, which is something that we don’t see as the North Sea is perceived as calm and peaceful. People are quite surprised to hear how chaotic it is. I didn’t know this either, before I took the deep dive – literally.”

The second semester was dedicated to materialisation and production. “The onset of the pandemic in March was a bit stressful, but I had a clear idea on what I wanted to do. I got in touch with Rijkswaterstaat, which monitors sound pollution in the North Sea. Rijkswaterstaat sent me their recordings.

Together with my friends at the Art Science department, I found ways of tracking the movements of people in space and connecting this to visuals and sounds representing the North Sea. The idea with the installation was to make people aware of their ‘presence’ in the North Sea, as sources of noise pollution (for example cargo ships). To summarise, I took three steps: I began with research on ‘the hyperobject’ and the relation between humans and non-humans, then narrowed down to sound pollution, and finally I materialised the project with the medium that felt right for it.”

th a N n a p i d n a S

Thinking ahead and considering the study trajectory of the second semester, what helped Sandipan was to engage with local organisations that deal with similar issues and that were working in the digital realm, which he knew he wanted to work in.

“I looked into organisations such as the Digital Society School, 46

Sandipan Nath

Interference 53°N, 42°E

47

EXPLORATIVE PHASE

visited a conference in Eindhoven where Timothy Morton gave a lecture

i on e s e nt a t r p e r l ca ( (p o l i t i o n h u m a n ) ) n e h of t Bruno Latour, Eva Meijer

joined Sissel Marie Tonn’s Reading Room where artists and researchers would come together to read and discuss, there I met attornet and climate activist Laura Fighting for the rights of the Whanganui river in New Zealand and now for the North Sea

TRAJECTORY SANDIPAN s e t hn t i s p e ci e

og r a ph

y))

ce n e ) ) ( (mu l t hr o p o n A e h ) t f e ct i ve s) h i ng s ) ) cr a c y o p t o s f r o m e e t p d n n ( ( me u ma ( (p a r l i a ( (n o n h

reading more (Slavoj Žižek, Peter Paul Verbeek, Don Ihde, Bruno Latour, Arturo Escobar) also looked at local organisations dealing with digital work flows (Digital Society School Amsterdam), Next Nature Network, Multispecies Salon

< READING < CONFERENCE VISITS < LITERATURE REVIEWS

< READING LITERATURE REVIEWS < EXPLORING ORGANISATIONS TO POSSIBLY COLLABORATE WITH < READING < READING

I interviewed her, she introduced me to the Embassy of the North Sea leading me to the issue of underwater pollution

< INTERVIEW

‘Rethinking relationality: The challenge of the Non-Humans’

Rijkswaterstaat provided me with recordings from underwater pollution

< ‘ACADEMIC’ THESIS looked at audiovisual artist Herman Kolgen, Timothy Morton and Bjork’s letters

received help from friends from art science department immersive audiovisual installation connecting movement of people in space to their presence in the North Sea

GRADUATION PROJECT

DESIGN RESEARCH MATERIALISATION PRESENTATION

important for transition from literature to project!

SUMMER OCTOBER

reading texts by Graham Harman, Timothy Morton

DESIGN RESEARCH

texts by Donna Haraway, Karen Barad

DECEMBER JANUARY JUNE- (SEPT)

l og y)) e d o nt o t n e i r o tog y)) ((obj e c n o nt o l g i s e d ( (

‘Interference 53°N, 42°E’

48

Sandipan Nath

< INSTALLATION Interference 53°N, 42°E

49

Elena Genesio attended the MA Industrial Design programme from 2018-2020. Her research took her back to Italy, where she explored changing food relationships and traditions, about which she wrote her thesis titled ‘Food anthologies: a research on the evolution of food culture through the past and current century’. For her graduation project titled The Cooking Gesture Archive, she focused on recording the embodied knowledge of her grandmother. Currently she works at Dutch Invertuals in Eindhoven as a ‘design researcher’.

While on a trip in the mountains and along the coast in Italy over the summer before the second year started, Elena was contemplating the landscape, the habits and food traditions of that region, and the ways in which the landscape relates to food. “Once I was back in the Netherlands, I began to collect references. What will happen to these landscapes in the future? What will become of the landscape and the food it grows? Which crops and foods are threatened and affected by climate change?”

At that point in her research, she felt she was losing the connection to Italy and to food traditions specifically, so she went back and visited various food festivals. “In Italy there are seasonal festivals such as the potato festival and the truffle fair.

I took quite some photographs and conducted interviews until I became overwhelmed by the amount of material I had collected.

I was a bit lost, I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. As I had focussed too much on the region, I sought to make it personal.

What did all of this mean to me?”

her own flour nor the meat of her own animals. Her memory of this life is still held in her hands. I also considered the life of my mother and the relation she had to food. I talked with people at the supermarket, farms, in order to understand where and how this relation unfolds. Again, I came back with all this material…”

Connecting her initial theoretical research on changing food patterns, the landscape and climate change, she decided to write three stories of three generations, that took place in three locations featuring three pasta recipes. “The third scenario was more speculative. How can we substitute ingredients in order to adapt to the changing future? Where will my ingredients come from in fifty years? I made pasta from cricket flour, which tasted quite horrible.”

“I thought this speculative method and its materialisation would become my final project, but instead I focused on my grandmother and her relation to food, which I found more important. The graduation project was about the gestures and the knowledge she embodies in her hands, which is going to be lost if it’s not recorded. I made sculptures, from the moulds of the gestures and I projection-mapped the gestures onto the sculptures. This became the The Cooking Gestures Archive. The process was serendipitous; everything just came together. In a way it has always been a bit like that for me.”

Elena began to interview her grandmother, which helped her shift the research. She would follow her grandmother to the garden and the local market, in order to understand what her relation is to food and how this relation has changed throughout her life. “She was a farmer. She had a close relation to food, as she was growing her own food, harvesting it, making her own flour for her own pasta. She still makes this pasta, but not with 50

Elena Genesio

io s e en

G a len

E The Cooking Gestures Archive

51

EXPLORATIVE PHASE

was in Italy, looked at landscape, traditions, habits, and food

TRAJECTORY ELENA ( (f u

d l and tur e fo o

s ca p e s )

)

< TRIPS/FIELD RESEARCH < THEORY/LITERATURE REVIEWS

theoretical research into influence of climate on future of food and loss of food traditions

back to Italy, visited lots of food festivals, seasonal festivities, took a lot of photos, conducted interviews

DATAMATERICAL COLLECTION DESIGN RESEARCH PRESENTATION MATERIALISATION GRADUATION PROJECT

SUMMER OCTOBER DECEMBER JANUARY JUNE- (SEPT)

DESIGN RESEARCH

< PHOTOS/INTERVIEWS interviewed my grandmother/mother, followed them to the supermarket, how they relate to food (knowledge), how they hold food

what did all of this mean to me? shift from the general to the personal < INTERVIEWS < OBERSERVATION ‘SHADOWING’

talked to farmers / people at supermarkets back in NL, back to theoretical research

three stories of three generations, three recipes dinner table with three menus telling the stories

< THEORY/LITERATURE REVIEWS

‘Food anthologies: a research on the evolution of food culture through the past and current century’

< STORYTELLING < RESEARCH DOCUMENT: THREE STORIES

invented a recipe for the future (cricket flower, quite horrible)

what if we forget to make pasta? focus on my grandmother and her embodied pasta making gestures

speculative performance ‘where will my ingredients come from in the future’? missed the aspect of tradition

< SPECULATIVE COOKING < SPECULATIVE PERFORMANCE < VIDEO REGISTRATION

went back to my grandmother recorded her movements

< EXPERIMENTING in NL (lockdown) tried to learn to make pasta, based on recordings and phone conversations with my grandmother

archive of gestures of embodied knowledge tactile ‘negative’ of gestures in sculptures gestures projection mapped onto sculptures

< INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION WITH OBJECT/SCULPTURES

‘The Cooking Gestures Archive’

52

Elena Genesio

The Cooking Gestures Archive

53

Johanna Günzl had a background in psychology before attending the MA Industrial Design programme from 2017-2019.

Her research revolved around ‘microplastics’, culminating in her thesis ‘Hidden kingdom, exploring the uncharted paths of a hyperobject’, and graduation project Micro Matters. Johanna currently works as a service designer for Randstad.

Johanna’s research project began in the second semester of the first year, between April and May. She read an article about microplastics in die Zeit that triggered her. “As a soonto-be an industrial designer, I felt I didn’t know enough about prototyping and materials. Plastics are the material of our time, but I don’t know anything about them, so I wanted to get to know this material better. Microplastics are very abstract, you can say they are ‘hyperobjects’. In most conversations, people confirmed, ‘yes it’s a big problem, but what can we do about it, let’s move on’. Others advised me to take on another topic, but I was compelled. What is my role as a designer? What can I do to clean the environment from plastics?”

The question of how to work with an invisible, intangible material became the core of the project. During her walks, while thinking about the project, she began to notice microplastics on the ground. These walks weren’t meant as ‘microplastics walks’, but they developed as such. “You start to see patterns everywhere.

As a researcher you are the one making connections. I started colour-sorting what I found. From there I made assumptions and connections. Initially I was interested in the notion of ‘hyberobjects’, but I found it too abstract to begin with. Only later did I return to theory, which helped me to grasp how to move from the tangible to the abstract.”

“I had no clue what to expect from this cute, but very polluted little village. During this field trip I spoke to many people, documented my experiences, and these conversations helped me to grasp what this seemingly invisible material looks like.

Suddenly I had material that showed what it was.”

“Throughout the project I read scientific articles, blog posts and newspapers. I also made tracings and mappings from these materials. Where do things come from and where do they go?

Once I collected data, writing the thesis helped me to structure the whole story and come to an understanding of how everything is connected. What is the common thread in all this?”

Towards the end of the research, Johanna made a map of the various strategies designers can take to intervene when it comes to a ‘hyperobject’ such as microplastics. She also set a goal for herself to design an actual product. “I stumbled upon the fact that most microplastics we inhale come from our indoor environment and surfaces, such as sofas. To me there is a tension I find interesting, as we perceive the home as a safe environment. The small ecosystem of their own home seemed to be a good place to understand how microplastics affect them. After brainstorming, sketching and iterating, I developed an air purifier, ‘a lung’, which hyperventilates when it signals microplastics, for example, whenever you change the bedsheets.

It was an intense process to develop a working prototype in the last six weeks, but I managed.”

Johanna found out that the Rhine river is one of the most polluted rivers with microplastics, especially in Rees, a small city in the area of Niederrhein close to the eastern border of the Netherlands, for which she planned a ‘microplastics research trip’.

54

Johanna Günzl

a n n ha

Jo Micro Matters

55

l z n Gü

EXPLORATIVE PHASE GRADUATION PROJECT

MATERIALISATION

DESIGN RESEARCH PRESENTATION

DATAMATERICAL COLLECTION

SUMMER OCTOBER JANUARY JUNE

DESIGN RESEARCH read an article about microplastics in die Zeit, as a designer I should know more about this: how to change behaviour? how to research something that is micro? I started noticing microplastics everywhere during walks

TRAJECTORY JOHANNA ( ( m i cr o

p l a st i c s

))

formulating research question (received the advice not to work on microplastics, this triggered me)

reading (again) about ‘hyperobjects’ (Timothy Morton) where to research microplastics? the Rhine river is one of the most polluted rivers, planned to go there, not sure what to expect

lots of conversations, photos, collected lots of material that showed what this invisible problem looks like

< READING NEWSPAPER ARTICLE < FORMULATING A QUESTION < WALKING/NOTICING

< THEORY/LITERATURE REVIEW < FIELD RESEARCH < OBSERVATIONS < INTERVIEWS < DOCUMENTATION < MAPPING < TRACING MATERICAL < RESEARCH/ < CLASSIFICATION < DRAWING

collected microplastics, challenged existing definition, came up with own definition

map/inventory of different strategies how designers can tackle hyperobjects ‘Hidden Kingdom: exploring the unchartered paths of a hyperobject’

< RESEARCH DOCUMENT: OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH (my goal for MA: make an actual object!) more research into how microplastics travel and where they occur (mostly in domestic environments)

interesting tension: safe home environment vs. dangerous inhalation of microplastics

< MAPPING/ LITERATURE RESEARCH < SKETCHING/PROTOTYPING

sketching ideas for an airpurifier that signals presence of microplastics

‘Micro Matters’

56

Johanna Günzl

Micro Matters

< OBJECT 57

Master Industrial Design Royal Academy of Art Prinsessegracht 4 www.kabk.nl

Text & editing

Rosa te Velde (tutor Theory Master Industrial Design)

Editing & proofreading Rana Ghavami

Graphic design

Mahtab Zamanifar

Photography credits

Page 49, installation view: Jamal Ageli

Thanks to

Maaike Roozenburg (head of Master of Industrial Design, KABK) and Zara Roelse (coordinator Master of Industrial Design, KABK); Elena Genesio, Johanna Günzl, Shailoh Phillips, Sandipan Nath, Honor Newman, Yassine Salihine, Saskia van Stein, Dori Tunstall, Alice Twemlow.

Printing

Groenprint, Rotterdam

Copyright Master Industrial Design, KABK The Hague / The Netherlands, September 2021 58

Introduction

Research at the crossroads

59