WORDS Nadine Botha
What makes Dutch Design Week so unique is its location: Eindhoven. A small city with farming origins, a history of being home to the Phillips factory, and now regarded by Forbes magazine as the most inventive place in the world due to the high density of technology startups, IP registrations and students.
Between the pioneering industrial design of Eindhoven’s University of Technology, and the renowned avant-garde milieu of the Design Academy, a design festival that explores the sci-fi-like qualities of our present and future emerges. Or, in short: less chairs, more virtual reality.
The impact of game-changing technologies on how we live was explored in numerous high profile exhibitions this year. Big data, the internet of things, hyperreality, sentient machines, and the disappearance of privacy were key themes in exhibitions such as the Age of Wonderland that hosted six fellows from around the world to explore big data in relation to indigenous knowledge; Manifestations that asked if we’re designing the future or if it’s designing us (are we in The Matrix?), and In No Particular Order, showing the country’s emerging designers. These and thematic exhibitions on health and education by the Stimuleringsfonds – the Netherlands’ creative funding agency – not only challenged society’s blind adoption of technology, but also presented radical alternative applications. For instance, Ali Eslami explored how instead of virtual reality as escapist fantasy, using it to foster more empathy and understanding of terrorism-related death tolls.
There was also a mood of apocalypse, resourcefulness and restraint, with social issues taking centre stage in the Making of Your World exhibition, curated by Bas van Abel – founder of the Fairphone, which is a smartphone that is open-source, modular, recyclable and guarantees ethical sourcing of materials. Iman Abdurrahman explored how when disaster strikes, all our fancy technology may well be useless, but the humble radio will play on. At Modebelofte, top fashion students showed how we might adapt our clothes to become resources for shelter, safety and energy in an apocalyptic world.
Clothes, but especially textiles, came up for a complete rethinking and reshaping. No longer simply textured, fabrics were sculptural and architectural, often with extra features like sound, light or pollution absorption. The likes of Milou Voorwinden, Emma Wessel and Robin Maas explored the potential of weaving optical fibres, wires, yarn and any type of thread they could lay their hands on. Bart Hess opened his studio, presenting a treasure trove of artificial hides, with the flesh coloured Royal Latex Bed really getting under your skin, so to speak.
Milou Voorwinden
Emma Wessel
Bart Hess
Robin Maas
Continuing from their exhibitions at Milan Design Week earlier this year, collectives like Dutch Invertuals and Envisions showed how we might also find some spontaneity, whimsy and craft in this era of high-tech. The style is exemplified by Bastiaan de Nennie who toys with making the virtual subconscious physical. This post-Memphis digital candy aesthetic was also picked up by Pop Core, and MU’s For Play exhibition that went above and beyond to delightfully show that designing sex is not about dildos and vibrators.
Bastiaan de Nennie
When there is speed and technology, there is also always the countermovement. Atelier NL took their exploration of heirloom clay sourced from specific locations in the Netherlands to the next level, serving vegetables grown in the same soil as the plate was made from. Pressing pause was Maarten Baas with his Making Time exhibition that presented a retrospective of his work (possibly the most chairs in any of the exhibitions during DDW), and his on-going fascination with the concept of time. He presented 12 boxes in a clock-like circle, inside of which real actors completed mundane everyday tasks to show that real time is not measured in minutes or seconds. A collection of other time-measuring devices were also on display.
Atelier NL
Maarten Bass
Of course, there were also those domestic objects that, with a profoundly reinvented form, give a pure aha moment. Like Christian Heikoop’s Glissade furniture range that shows the truly flatpack is not even solid, but fabric like a tent. Pinkie Patisserie’s glass Cake Tower, Paul Ketz’s storage Nest and Zeljka Zrnic’s One Day Stand would be welcome in VISI’s home any day.
Christian Heikoop
Paul Ketz
Zeljka Zrnic
