In Eindhoven hundreds of exhibitors, especially design schools and young independent designers, challenge the present and common conventions to show ways we would not have imagined

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”.

The Design Academy Eindhoven show

It is difficult to summarise recurring trends and themes in a broad educational offering that has always transcended conventional disciplinary divisions. What is most surprising about the degree projects on display is the relational and “collective” approach, the exploration of social rituals and different cultures that pervade everyday life and the reinterpretation of the vernacular through old and new technologies.

Students often place themselves in a gender perspective, capturing the richness of the ethnic mix in which the study environment itself has placed them.

The winners of the Design Academy Eindhoven Awards 2024 are a paradigm of this: the magazine Mnemotope, promoted by Lilou Angelrath and Réiltín O’Hagan, which proposes a collective approach to publishing for a more dynamic and inclusive industry, or The Blue Flower Syndrome by Benze De Ream which, citing the classification algorithm for flowers by the British eugenicist Ronald Fisher (1934), analyses influencers online and warns against machine learning based on the discriminatory classification of data.

The meanings of soil at the Van Abbe Museum

Soil is the foundation of life, not only the walkable soil that defines territories and geographies but also what we recognize as cultural and social identity. It is, in a broad sense, the place where our ancestors built and that we bring back to future generations.

The exhibition Soils, a curatorial collaboration between the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Struggles for Sovereignty and the Van Abbemuseum – until November 24 in Eindhoven, then in Jakarta in 2025 – selects different case studies from around the world, from historical-social issues linked to specific geographies to cases of climate urgency to which artists have given sensitive form.

And here the beautiful yet disturbing photographs of melting Alpine glaciers by Diewke van den Heuvel are juxtaposed with the earth sculpture of Pluriversity Weavers, made using the techniques of the pre-Columbian tribe Iku, which criticizes patriarchy and colonialism in Colombia.

Symbiocene, perspectives of interspecies coexistence

In a lush park on the outskirts of Eindhoven, the BioArt Laboratories are a cultural institution that facilitates the production and dissemination of design and art projects that redefine the ecology of human habitats in order to advance the demands of the era that follows the Anthropocene, in which it is necessary for man to place himself in symbiosis with nature and technology.

Many of the selected projects show the inclusion of other species in the production processes: such as Brio by Belgian Arnaud Tantet, who uses colonies of plastic-eating worms to sculpt the shape of the molds for his metal tools; Hana Polak's building bricks, which design an entire life cycle from a bat shelter to fertilizing plants for green walls; or Startel's Living Colour Files which create colored patterns on canvas through the flight of flies on small tubs of color, in a form of organic disorder that cites the works of Jackson Pollock.

Cover photo: ph. Max Kneefel