Design × Teaching

with Lisa Baumgarten (DE) & Alice Twemlow (UK), moderated by Breg Horemans (BE)

The demand for care in our design education is getting louder every day. Design schools often operate as 'dehumanised enterprises', aimed at employment within an industry focused on extraction and exploitation. In this Design Dialogue, we explore a critical feminist perspective, which attempts to soften and dismantle the logic of 'over-demanding and over-production'. We look at what design education - from kindergarten to the supervision of a PhD student - needs in a world that is crying out for a regenerative, healing design attitude. How can we make processes of care in education more visible, and revalue them? How do we develop design education in a burned-out society? And how can design education safeguard its position as a playground for personal and collective growth processes?

Design × Teaching is part of the curated lecture series Design Dialogues organised by the Design Department of KASK & Conservatorium and Design Museum Gent. Distinctive voices from the broad field of design are invited to reflect on the role and future of design in a changing world. Each lecture is a critical dialogue around a theme and concludes with an open discussion between the speakers and the audience. After a whirlwind first edition, we are heading for a new series of in-depth talks. The concept has been slightly modified: young talent now gets carte blanche to invite an experienced expert for an inspiring dialogue. Our mission remains unchanged: to provide engaging perspectives that could help us meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Speakers

Lisa Baumgarten (DE)

Lisa Baumgarten is a critical design mediator. She is the co-creator of the participatory research platform Teaching Design that focuses on design education from intersectional feminist and decolonial perspectives. Since 2017, Lisa has been teaching design theory and practice at German and international universities. In October 2021 she started as interim professor of Design Sciences at the Institute of Design Research at Braunschweig University of Art where she facilitates seminars in the Master's programme Transformation Design.

In addition to her creative practice, Lisa is working on her second Master's degree in Cultural Studies at Humboldt University Berlin. Her current research focuses on design education, its entanglements with neoliberalism and formats of resonating and emancipating teaching/learning experiences. Lisa's research has been published and presented at the Creative Bodies-Creative Minds conference in Graz and in Form Design Magazine, among others. Her most recent essay, written in collaboration with design philosopher Mara Recklies, is about digital learning tools and their effects on teaching/learning spaces in design education.

• https://lisabaumgarten.de/
• https://teaching-design.net/
• @lis.baum
• @teaching.design

Alice Twemlow (UK)

Dr. Alice Twemlow is a research professor at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague and associate professor at Leiden University, where she supervises PhD Arts candidates. She was recently appointed as the first special professor in the Wim Crouwel Chair in History, Theory and Sociology of Graphic Design and Visual Culture at the University of Amsterdam. There, she investigates how an intersectional data-feminist approach can be used to reread and thereby decolonise the graphic design archive.

At the intersection of design history, environmental humanities, literary studies and artistic research, Twemlow's research explores topics such as the relationship between time and design, walking as a research method and salvage as a concept.

Previously, Twemlow was head of the Master's department of Design Curating & Writing at the Design Academy Eindhoven and before that she was the founding chair of the MFA in Design Criticism and the MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her book, Sifting the Trash: A History of Design Criticism, was published by MIT Press in 2017.

• https://alicetwemlow.com/
• @alicetwemlow

Moderator

Breg Horemans (BE)

Breg Horemans is artistic researcher and co-founder of TAAT, a liquid collective of artists working on the verge of performance and installation art. Since 2011, Breg renegotiates his relation to architecture through transdisciplinary collaborations with a focus on the regenerative and performative potential of architecture. The desire of his practice lies in a constant negotiation of relationships through space: in the experience of installation work as in their respective creation processes. The projects initiated by TAAT instigate an eternal prototyping of ‘becoming spaces’, as sites for encounter, knowledge sharing and learning processes in the broadest sense. Breg is affiliated as lecturer for practice based learning at KU Leuven.

• https://taat-shadow.netlify.app/
• @bregho_