Alice Twemlow: Making Waste: Unearthing the Metaphors, Values, and Temporalities of Product Design and its Criticism

Alice Twemlow founded the SVA MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism in New York, in 2008, and chaired it until 2015. Now based in Amsterdam, she is co-head of the MA in Design Curating & Writing at Design Academy Eindhoven. She writes and lectures on all aspects of design culture, and has recently contributed to Dirty Furniture, History of Design Journal, Eye, Design Observer, Graphisme en France (CNAP, 2016), and Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things (Berg, 2014), among others.

In this talk, based on her forthcoming book Sifting the Trash: A History of Design Criticism (MIT Press, 2017), Alice will consider historical instances when critics attempted to question design’s impact on the physical environment and the social psyche as well as how experimental modes of practice and speculative projects offer an array of precedents for how product design and its criticism might be conducted in the future.

Image: Cover of Student Handbook, an unofficial publication printed on newsprint and distributed at the International Design Conference Aspen 1970, showing a sculpture of junked cars and appliances, painted white and assembled in Aspen by students from Northern Illinois University under the supervision of their professor, Don Strel, in 1969. Courtesy of The Getty Research Institute.