This Dutch Designer Says the Boldest Ideas of the Future May Come From China | 100 People With Ideas

Daan says he has grown fond of the fresh vocabulary China has given him

You may have heard, in one place or another, about a few of these wildly imaginative ideas:

A foreign designer built a giant vacuum cleaner that would suck all the PM2.5 out of Beijing's air in one go; the Netherlands has a cool, self-illuminating smart highway, and a bike path that shows Van Gogh's Starry Night at night; and recently, above a square in Amsterdam, deep-blue water light rippled through the night air, as if you were on the seabed…

That's right — all of them come from the same designer. His name is Daan Roosegaarde, a tall, slightly gaunt 36-year-old Dutchman who opened a studio in Shanghai a few years ago and has turned up in China again and again since. He has just moved his home base in the Netherlands, so we went to look around his new studio in Rotterdam.

The studio sits near Rotterdam's industrial park: a roomy, bright glass box where several dozen people now work on design, technology and other fields. Daan gave the studio the theme "City of Tomorrow," but the phrase he uses most often for his own work is "techno-poetry."

First, that story about a "smog vacuum cleaner" to be installed in a Beijing park, sucking away the PM2.5 problem — it is true. The machine now looks like a black cylindrical hut, so it has been renamed the Smog Free Tower; the first version is about seven meters tall. Daan says that as the media paid more attention to the project, the studio has had good talks with Beijing officials and is now working with them. This September, the "world's largest smog absorber" will first be tested in the new studio's backyard, and Beijing will send people over to inspect it. By the end of the year, it should be standing in a Beijing park.

The idea for the vacuum cleaner came to Daan while he was living in Beijing, marveling at how the smog made the CCTV building appear and disappear in front of his eyes. "It was as if there were a giant vacuum cleaner on the roof," he said.

Wouldn't it be nice if a giant vacuum cleaner could suck the smog away? Plenty of people have had that daydream. But Daan is the first to make such a far-fetched idea real.

He is good at using technology to pull off oddball ideas.

Most of the land in the Netherlands lies below sea level, and only superb coastal dike design keeps this low country from being swallowed by the sea. Everyone who lives here knows it. "But we all seem to have forgotten it — forgotten how Dutch culture and nature act on each other." Daan pulled up pictures of Waterlicht, the work he staged on Amsterdam's Museumplein in early May this year, clearly proud of it.

This whole field of computer-designed blue waves simulated the real height of sea level, projected over the empty Museumplein. The blue light stood well above the ground, and inside it, with the light streaming overhead — part ripple, part mist — the scene felt like a dream.

Daan's best-known work is the Smart Highway, which won Denmark's 2013 INDEX: Design to Improve Life award. "One day I was driving on a highway in the Netherlands," Daan recalled. "You know, the Dutch are very boring — a highway that wide, and nobody speeds."

"It struck me that we spend so much money and effort on cars, and then hundreds of millions more on highways that break the natural landscape completely. And these highways look exactly the way they did half a century ago. Why has nobody made them a little more beautiful?"

Daan, who knows what to do with light, designed a smart highway he calls "Route 66 of the Future." When it rains or snows, patterns of snowflakes appear on the road surface, then vanish once the sun comes out. Lights scattered along the roadside come on only as a car passes, lighting the hundred meters ahead, so the road runs in waves of light. And the ordinary lane markings are painted with luminous paint that soaks up daylight and lights the road at night…

Daan tested that luminous paint on a bike path called the Van Gogh Path, in the southern Dutch city of Eindhoven. At night the path gives off points of starlight, like Van Gogh's famous Starry Night, and does away with the usual streetlamps.

"None of this is high technology. As soon as I had the idea, I found that many universities and academies of science had already run the experiments, and the results could go straight onto existing roads. All I did was go to their archives and take the research out of the drawers it was hidden in," Daan said. "So more than design, what interests me is changing ideas. I want to be the hippie of the business world, the one who puts ideas out there."

These "hippie" ideas, playful as they are, caught the attention of Beijing officials — and of Heijmans, Europe's largest road contractor, which heard about the Smart Highway design, knocked on the door of Daan's studio and asked: "How much does this smart highway cost?"

From Tokyo to Shanghai to Qatar to Amsterdam, that is the question Daan meets most often — though he would rather people did not ask "how much will this cost" and instead sat down to talk with him about what each of them actually wants. Still, behind that blunt-sounding question is trust: trust that these ideas can be tried at large scale. It also shows how far Daan's studio has come.

In his earlier years Daan's ideas were much smaller — in scale, at least. Around 2011 he made a dress for models that changed color with emotion, called Intimacy: as the model came into contact with other people, the black or white fabric turned more and more transparent. Or there was Dune, an installation from around 2006 — a long corridor fitted with interactive lights and sound equipment. People walking through it and touching things as they went would set off faint lights and sounds like insects chirping.

Intimacy

Dune was also the first of Daan's works to come to China. "I watched Chinese kids running and playing inside Dune," Daan said. "It felt very different from the way it was shown in the Netherlands. The Dutch would stop and study it carefully — why the lights and the sound were interactive, and where the interactive devices were hidden."

Dune

In China, the city Daan visits most often, and likes best, is Shanghai. It holds a trace of memory left by European colonists as well as change at a Chinese pace, which makes it both familiar and strange to him.

"It is like a huge shopping mall with an elevator in the middle, and every floor has a theme — maybe new tech products, maybe jazz. One button in the elevator changes the place you are in, and with it your mood and your feelings. To me that is China: a strange, overexcited functional complex that builds such a disorderly scene, and yet one full of poetry."

"China is full of hope for the future, and at the same time aware that it may be losing some of its traditions. That combination fills China with the air of remaking reality. Fixed notions of beauty or ugliness lose their meaning in a place like that. And maybe that is a good thing?"

Daan offered one idea that came from China: a drone floating above your head, giving off sound waves that hang around you like a bubble, so that even in the middle of a noisy city you would not hear a single stray sound.

"The boldest ideas of the future may come from China."

Daan says he has grown fond of the fresh vocabulary China has given him. Dutch culture — as you can see from a century of stubbornly locking the sea above the land — likes control; everything has its set rules.

For now, both China's freshness and the Netherlands' rules are helping him along. Behind the push for Beijing's "smog-free park" plan is the Dutch foreign ministry, quietly making the introductions; and in the Netherlands he has just been commissioned by the infrastructure ministry to use similar interactive technology on the dikes of the country's epic fight with the sea, adding a layer of charm to embankments that have long been monotonous.