The Dutch Design Week is one of the most honest looks at young creativity and independent and research design.
Although the participants mostly include design schools from Northern Europe or designers from those geographies, the week of events and exhibitions scattered around the city that once housed Philips presents us with fresh, sometimes naive, but visionary points of view on the essential problems that the world is facing: from the scarcity of resources to the necessary change in production and consumption processes, from the reinterpretation of material culture through the perspective of minorities to the technological evolution that seems to overwhelm us.
A “bottom-up” event that features little product design and many research or conceptual projects and that aims to “inform a discussion”, as Miriam van der Lubbe, creative director of the Dutch Design Foundation that organizes the event, comments.
“This year’s title, Real Unreal, suggests that change often has an abstract beginning but takes shape as we work on it, preferably together. So, compared to previous editions, we see less observation and more problem solving”.