The writer, critic and educator in conversation with James Auger

I’d like to begin with the theme of Design and the Deep Future - which for me challenges the very existence of contemporary design and the approaches that were developed during the 20th Century - I’m thinking of design as a novelty machine inspired by relentless innovation and rapid obsolescence. How do you encourage students to break free of such short-term thinking to embrace the complex challenges that a deep time approach might encourage?
I was hired by KABK as a Lector (Research Professor) to launch a new Lectorate (Readership) focused on design. In the Netherlands art and design academies do not have university status and so they use lectorates to try bring research to them. The way I interpreted this mandate, in very general terms, was to nurture a research culture at KABK, to give it a palpable presence and visible identity, with the goal of enriching and pushing the boundaries of creative practices, sharpening research-informed pedagogy, and contributing to knowledge.
More specifically, I established the project, “Design and the Deep Future.”
In 2017, when I was hired, I was researching waste. As you allude to in your question, since the rise of a mass-produced disposable product culture in the postwar period in the Global North, design has orbited the new and the novel, the innovative and the instant. The creative industries and their mechanisms of mediation are economically dependent on a steady stream of new products and services so there is no incentive to prolong the period of time when a product is desirable and useful before it enters the conceptual and then physical realm of trash.
Designed products are usually conceived of in their state of imminence—as shiny and bounded materialisations of creative ingenuity, manufacturing labour and consumer desire. Such conceptions represent only one ephemeral moment in their itineraries, however. After their periods of usefulness are over, and they are disposed of, their presence as post-design waste can become much more permanent, and harmful. Whether in the form of toxin-leaching e-waste, indelible plastiglomerates or as ingested microplastics—the implications of design processes and products will have lasting and profound consequences in our planetary and atmospheric record, our biological legacy and our deep futures.
As you point out, the title of my lectorate/project acknowledges the geological concept of deep time. I put this theme at the centre of the research unit to prompt KABK students and staff to research the environmental consequences of a disposable product design culture, engage with expanded timescales and contribute alternative imaginaries to environmental and climate justice research.
It prompts exploration of existing phenomena such as digital data detritus, microplastics, and space junk, and, engages with speculative mitigation and intervention practices such as repair and maintenance, dematerializing design and the use of biopolymers.
But I think its main premise is that in order to fully inhabit dispositions of care and reparation, in order to practice, teach and learn the skills and capacities needed to re-connect with other beings and entities, we need to attend to alternative understandings of time beyond the linear, progressive, and globally synchronized, and toward the cyclical, plural, glitching, and inefficient.
To provide counters to the unsustainable and unjust pace of seasonal and daily output, the artificial constructs of module and semester, practices of care and repair need to be accompanied by a radical shift in temporal perspectives. Consideration of space time, queer time, crip time, seed time, or ancestral cosmologies, immersion in the fluxes of time associated with Afrofuturism, hauntology or the pluriverse, and engagement with tactics such as interruption, rest, dysfluency, and slowness, for example, can help in the collective re-imagining of modes of learning, doing and being human beyond the Capitalocenic.
Especially relevant in this respect is the geological concept of deep time, first described by the 18th century Scottish geologist James Hutton, who saw that the cycles of sedimentation and erosion which had given the planet its stratified topography, required a timescale that not only exploded the Biblical creation narrative, but was of a magnitude so vast that in it, as Hutton observed, “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” The KABK Design Lectorate posits that this immensity of timescale can be a departure point for compositing climate justice imaginaries in our post-design times.
This loosely relates to a more simple question about the relation between practice and theory. Your background is in design history and criticism - at what point did your teaching (and related knowledge) become more directly applied to design practice? (I’m reminded of Historical & Critical studies at the RCA which, during my time there, was quite dislocated from the development of student projects). How can practice and theory combine more effectively through pedagogy?
Actually for me, practice has always there as a baseline. My parents are both designers, and although I chose to follow a different path—English Literature BA and Design History MA and then, later, a PhD—design practice was always a close reference point, subconsciously as well as consciously, I think.
In my early career as an adjunct lecturer in history, theory and critical thinking, I always found it frustrating how these subjects are taught as separate from the other aspects of their design education. The separation tends to be physical as well as conceptual. In most design departments and schools I’ve taught in, a student literally had to go to another room or building for history, theory, critical studies. I always made a point of teaching these subjects in the design studio, taking it to the local context of where they did their making. It’s a small step, but I think it helped to reinforce what I was telling students about the interrelationship in any design exploration between all the various elements such as context, form, theory, use, politics, research, personal involvement, technique etc.
When I set up the MA in Design Criticism (at SVA in New York), the goal wasn’t about enriching design practice at all; the students came from all kinds of education backgrounds and we wanted to find new ways to interrogate design as a social reality through writing or curating or radio-making or whatever. So then we approached practice from a different perspective— almost as anthropologists—it was one aspect among many that we needed to investigate to fully understand design and its consequences.
More recently—since I’ve been in the Netherlands, I suppose—and through my role as a professor of research, I’ve been working with established artists and designers who, as PhD candidates, post-docs, post-graduates or tutors, want to pursue a research trajectory. And in this paradigm, someone’s practice becomes the philosophical and physical driver of the research enquiry. I wouldn’t say that I ever “apply” my knowledge to someone’s design practice, but I do think I know how to enter someone’s space of practice with them, and help them identify which are their ways of doing that could become methods and which are their ways of seeing the world that could become modes of process documentation. And I suppose my training in design history and my experience in design criticism helps me keep some pressure on that practitioner-researcher to articulate what the stakes of their research are, why anyone else should care, how their work might build on, or react to that of contemporaneous communities of practice or historical lineages.
Could you describe one or two student projects that emerged from the Deep time approach.
Within the various departments there have been some great student projects that reference and build from the Deep Futures project, but since my role isn’t a teaching one, it’s a bit of stretch for me claim them! I do work with students. For example, I interview them about their research for a Tuning into Research podcast, I oversaw the development of a research hub, known as the Zero-Waste Cabinet of Curiosities, designed and built by students from waste materials sourced at KABK; and I’ve taught courses including “Speaking Across Deep Time: Design and Nuclear Waste” and “Future Fossils: An Archaeology of the Here and Now.”
But my primary role is to supervise staff research; so, tutors, heads of department, workshop instructors, coordinators and so on. There are two that come to mind that certainly emerged from the Deep Futures theme in the context of a research group:
Katrin Korfmann https://www.kabk.nl/en/teachers/katrin-korfmann
Louis Braddock Clark: 44-47 in the publication, KABK Research, 2018-2023, People & Projects
https://www.kabk.nl/en/news/announcing-the-publication-of-kabk-research-people-projects-2018-2023
Academia allows for a certain amount of freedom to critique commercial design and to develop more appropriate approaches (for example, in relation to resources, circularity, repair, etc.). The challenge comes in applying these new ways of designing in real-life scenarios - How to make better connections between academia and outcomes in the real world?
I think this happens in larger academic institutions where there is more of a link between education, research, knowledge exchange and enterprise. But personally I have very little experience in partner-funded research. I’m not a designer, and the work I do is not focused on developing design. In fact, often it’s quite the reverse.
I was very happy to be invited to the recent edition of Fault Lines, the annual forum where you share and discuss the research projects developed by the Deep Futures Research Group. I was surprised by the blurring of art and design research approaches - was it a strategic decision to combine these? And if so, how do your researchers define their practices?
At its core KABK is an art academy, so even though my lectorate provides a reference point for the design programmes, I think one of the real strengths of the research we do, and our initiatives, are that they don’t need to conform to expectations of one discipline versus another. I love to learn from the approaches of artists and designers and theorists, and I think I’m quite adept at helping them learn from one other. So of the six people you met and saw present at this year’s Fault Lines Research Forum, and that were members of my group for the past 10 months: one is a workshop instructor in the 3D Printing Lab; one is a video maker who studied on the Artistic Research MA and currently is the coordinator of that programme; one is a performance artist who teaches in the Graphic Design department; one is a theorist who works with archives and teaches in the Non Linear Narrative MA; one is an experiential spatial practice artist, who teaches in the Art Science programme; and the last is a multimedia artist who teaches in a BA programme called Interactive Media Design. When someone is selected for my group, an additional 0,2 FTE is added to their contract for 10 months. During this time we meet once a month, with each member curating a day of immersion into their site of research practice. They work on individual projects but also collaboratively with me on iterating alternative interpretations, interventions and imaginaries in response to the central imperative of the Design & the Deep Future research project.
When they apply to my group, and during our discussions, I always ask these tutors to identify the practice and discourse to which they want their research to contribute. I am finding that it actually takes a while longer than 10 months for them to really figure this out. If by “blurring” you mean “lack of precision,” then perhaps it’s something to do with that.
Next year’s research group is made up only of previous members and with a focus on making research public. With this group, I think there may be more clarity and precision about approach and practice because they have had longer to think about it and iterate possibilities.
What are the main constraints that limit the potential of design education and education in general? (for example - the siloed nature of disciplinary methods and knowledge).
As I think I may have mentioned to you before, in my opinion the things that limit design education, and education in general, the most are the (often inherited) burdens of buildings and bureaucracy. To move beyond physical and conceptual siloes, and vocational training for a vocation that doesn’t make sense anymore, I think the next phase of education needs to begin with the question: What is the role of art and design practice in the context of climate catastrophe? To shape liveable futures, we will need to completely delink our habitual reference points, unlearn our current ways of doing, and radically evolve our conceptions of art and design practice, material production, and research. I truly believe research provides a way forward, especially if it is centred upon care, imagination and process.