A new era for Design Research at Design Academy Eindhoven
Continuing a legacy of thoughtful, cross-disciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration, these professorships will help shape the future of Design Research within the Academy and beyond.
The Academy is excited to welcome Dr Praveen Sewgobind to the Diversity and Inclusion professorship, Dr Ian Biscoe to the Transdisciplinary Design Networks professorship and Dr Annika Frye to The Non-School professorship.
Their work will be made public via the new DAE website, which will feature in-depth interviews with the professors in the coming months as well as projects, publications and reports.
Heartbeat of Becoming
The three new professorships form the core of Design Academy Eindhoven’s new research programme, Becoming, which is rooted in the notion that world we live in is in an accelerated mode of change, a constant state of becoming.
The Becoming programme follows on from the success of the Academy’s previous research groups – Places & Traces and Strategic Creativity – which, over the last decade, established a DNA for Design Research at Design Academy Eindhoven.
Diversity & Inclusion – ‘walking the walk’
Diversity and inclusivity are urgent topics that are too often used to make institutions look good, instead of being used as tools to truly enable a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging is fundamental for real inclusivity and diversity. Unless they are welcomed in a social context, those who have traditionally been marginalised will struggle to have a place at the table in the shifting dynamics of cities.
With an Indian, Surinamese and Dutch cultural background, Dr Praveen Sewgobind is an activist-academic researcher, working to further diversity and ethnicity theory in the Netherlands. His research at Design Academy Eindhoven will focus on theorising and materialising the conditions for inclusivity and diversity.
Dr Sewgobind’s work catalyses instruments, like pedagogical strategies, that underscore the necessity of ‘walking the walk’. For example the ‘walkshop’, a critical educational experience whereby participants become actors and engage with the real world. They combine practical and theoretical tools and contribute to the idea of the city as a place for cross-pollination and learning rather than exclusion and superficiality. He sees his work as inextricably connected to addressing configurations of power and privilege as exemplified by contributing to the current ERIF (European Race & Imagery Foundation) campaign.
Dr Praveen Sewgobind will start 1st of December 2020.
Transdisciplinary Design Networks – a kaleidoscopic blend of digital and analogue design
Dr Ian Biscoe brings together the arts and technology, with a transdisciplinary approach that draws on his background in science, systems integration, technology, architecture, performing and visual arts, design and business. His recent projects are infused with theories of space and time, exploring themes of identity, freedom, truth, responsibility and connectivity. His work is typically produced in collaboration and realised in multidisciplinary formats. His projects employ a variety of movement, music, sound, painting, live video, photography, film and scenography; blending analogue and digital techniques.
At DAE, Dr Biscoe’s research will focus on technological and societal networks, investigating how macroscopic thinking can be leveraged to address the global system-of-system challenges we all face. He will build on existing original research in the use of X Reality networked environments in art practice and education to investigate issues around planetary analysis, comprehension, design and communication.
Dr Ian Biscoe will start 1st of December 2020.
The Non-School – an alternative future for design education
What if design education was open, accessible and participatory? Overturning traditional concepts of the ‘design school’, Dr Annika Frye will experiment with new practices of network, communication and digital learning spaces to challenge the idea of the school as an enclosed, spatial entity.
Dr Frye is an expert in Open Design – which, in the context of design processes, breaks up hierarchies by creating a network of actors – and has recently been exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education. In the next stage of her research, she will investigate how to apply the strategies of Open Design to digital learning in design. Her professorship responds to and anticipates the next stage of an extraordinarily fertile culture of fully or partly remote learning opportunities and online or blended education programmes that has emerged in the last decade. It aims to recognise learning as becoming, using technology as an instrument of evolution and democratisation of learning in design.
Dr Frye is a designer and researcher. Her practices include writing, teaching and projects in the field of experimental industrial design. Also a professor of Design Studies at Muthesius Academy of the Arts in Kiel, Germany, she is currently researching changes in design processes regarding the qualities of digital materiality in the intersection of design, art and technology.
Dr Annika Frye will start in spring 2021.
For more information, contact:
Email: raffaela.vandermuhlen@designacademy.nl
Phone: 0031 06 41 80 84 49
