What does it mean to design the designer for an future
completely different to anything we have ever experienced?
Head of the Critical Inquiry Lab, Saskia van Stein discusses
why criticality, self-reflexivity, intuition, skills and community
are essential in deconstructing and making visible our
designed reality. Design as research and research as design
is an attitude of unfolding the possibilities of the transition
the world is in.
Nadine Botha First as curator at the Netherlands Architecture
Institute and then as director of Bureau Europa in Maastricht,
as well as an independent curator, moderator and cultural
commentator your work has distinguished itself with its pre-science. For instance, through introducing a political discourse into design discussions long before it became trendy,
as well as pre-empting emerging evolutions in design — like
performance and anthropology. How do you see these topics
and directions before they enter the broader discourse?
Saskia van Stein That’s very generous of you to say, and an
interesting question... Firstly I think that operating across
different disciplines — fine art, architecture, design and
broader cultural discourses — expands my perspective and
foresight. Within that, my approach is a combination of
intuition and curiosity. Intuition is a feeling in the body, and
mine is particularly driven by the visual. The curiosity is more
cerebral, and entails me questioning everything I see around
me. By constantly oscillating between the embodied visual
intuition and interrogative mental curiosity, I extrapolate
uncertain futures.
NB You seem to be describing an attitude, rather than simply
a professional vocation. Is this your approach to students of
the Critical Inquiry Lab?
SvS In setting up this Master’s, I found myself asking what I
have to say to a generation about what will be their reality to
come. There’s a lot of conversation going on around the post-
of everything at the moment – the post-human, post-political
and so on — and at least in my opinion, most of our belief
systems are deeply problematic in their gendered racialized
Eurocentricism. We need to examine our reasoning and
assumptions. If we think about the post discipline and the
expanding field of design, what would the attitude one would
need be? What actually constitutes the essence of this discipline? Based on this need to critically analyse the material and
immaterial systems that constitute our designed environment,
I wanted to create a space that offers safety and support for
young minds to develop their own voice and come up with a
vocabulary to express it. By this I not only mean literally their voice, but also how to position it within history, within a group
of peers and within a public context. So, while the core of the Master’s is research as design and design as research, the
curatorial aspect of making the project public can take any
suitable form, from a lecture or workshop to an exhibition or
even a sculpture. For this reason, even if the course is driven
by a higher-level interrogation of the discipline, practitioner
and self, it is structured around developing vocational skills
and craft — including editing, publishing, interviewing, performance, documentary etc. Although nearly custom-made
for each student to find their own tone and talent within these
practices, we are not only focused on the individual.
As a small tight-knit group we are very conscious of the power
dynamics and hierarchies. For instance, the students and
tutors all come from very different socioeconomic, cultural and
ethnic backgrounds, and we discuss the impact of this on
how we work together and the broader discipline. We make a
point to not only discuss it, but also explore different ways of
collaborating and engaging. It is a process of not only becoming critically aware of oneself as an agent, but integrating
this self-reflexivity into one’s work. A lot of the tutors say that
they are learning as much as the students. For myself too, it
has been a generative experience to return to education after
running an institution.
NB Besides posts- everyone is also talking about turns.
Perhaps you have gone from the institutional turn to the
pedagogical turn, and perhaps the name change from Design
Curating and Writing to the Critical Inquiry Lab is indicative of
the shift from the curatorial turn to the critical turn.
SvS Being closely involved in the Non-linear Narrative Master’s at KABK (Royal Academy of Art in The Hague), education
has given me the opportunity to expand my thinking around
the responsibilities we have towards the future generation.
Design no longer only follows form, it can follow anything so what do you want to follow and where do you want to
make a difference? Much to the dislike of those in power, we
are in an immense transition — change is due and change is
coming. We can blame capitalism for its unhinging capacity,
but it is rooted in so much more — religion, culture, gender,
history, language and so on. All these constructs are up for
critical revisioning and reinvigoration, and these turns are
tools. Design as research and the curatorial aspects of making
public remain the foundation of the Master’s, but the emphasis
is for students to develop their own autonomous, precise,
well-researched position through experimentation, rigour and reflexivity in order to not simply perpetuate the biases,
semantics and material reality of how the world is organised
at the moment, but to deconstruct it in a way that makes this
become visible.
NB Criticality can mean very different things to different people
in different contexts, and has even itself been criticized for
being divisive. What is criticality in this context?
SvS Of course, there’s not a straightforward answer. We
often talk about criticality from a purely cerebral perspective, through a philosophical lens of analytical reasoning, or
through the strains of abstraction and deconstruction from
the French philosophers. To me criticality is very different
to skepticism. We could call it productive doubt, but I like
the phrase extended judgment because it introduces the
not-knowing and questioning the question. Not-knowing is
not a naive position, but a space to see, overview, reconfigure, reread or reassemble the construct of reality. For me,
the critical lies in the not-knowing. It’s almost like how poetry
lies in the space between the words; criticality lies in the
space to oscillate between deep research and questioning
everything again.
NB What I’m hearing is that criticality is not only about hold-
ing multiple positions at the same time but also about creat-
ing a space. How does this space extend beyond the Master’s
itself?
SvS There is a curiosity about how we can build a community centred around criticality within the student body o the school. In fact, it’s more than curiosity, it’s human nature
to want to bond and have conversations with each other.
Throughout the year, the Critical Inquiry Lab students do
undertake tasks that encourage an interaction with other
students, as well as institutions and people in Eindhoven.
Now the students are working towards developing an annual
symposium that allows us to share a moment of in-depth reflection on the discipline with a broader professional audience.
NB By extension, if you are inviting students to design their
own role and own discipline, are the students designing the
designer?
SvS I like the provocation. I would hope to create an open
field where the students would position themselves somewhere in that whole span — whether researching design and
designing design, or remaining within vocational trajectories
like curation and publishing. There are different political
realities within all of these fields, and I hope that the Critical
Inquiry Lab assists students in unfolding and weaving themselves into different possibilities.