Look at These Graduation Projects! Northern Europe's Biggest Design Week Grew Out of a Student Show — Here Are This Year's Highlights

Next to Milan's glossy luxury, Dutch Design Week is a practical affair — the students still need their work to get them a job.

In 2017, the year the Dutch celebrated the 100th anniversary of De Stijl, the 16th Dutch Design Week ran as scheduled in Eindhoven from October 21 to 29.

Dutch Design Week is not a small event. It is the largest design gathering held in northern Europe each year. According to the organizers, 2,600 designers took part this year, and 430 exhibitions were staged at different locations in 100 cities. More than 330,000 people came.

A few of these exhibitions had already appeared at Milan Design Week first, on a bigger scale, yet this Eindhoven week still has an atmosphere entirely unlike Milan's. The difference probably goes back to their origins: Milan Design Week grew out of a furniture trade fair, while Dutch Design Week grew out of the graduation show that Design Academy Eindhoven puts on in the city every year.

Which is why Dutch Design Week was set up to serve designers in the first place. Its founding purpose was to connect designers with commercial clients and help them find more projects and more work.

"Dutch Design Week is about the future of design," said Martijn Paulen, director of the Dutch Design Foundation, which organizes the week, in a video introducing it. "Here we focus mainly on three things: design products or concepts that won't be released for another two or three years, a platform where makers can exchange ideas, and crossover collaboration."

You will rarely see a designer or a brand here selling finished goods. Established designers — and more often young ones, just graduated or still studying — tend to show an experimental social project they are working on, a technology, a solution, or a new question.

The well-known Dutch architecture studio MVRDV built a colorful "hotel of the future" in the city center to rethink the relationship between public and private space. Marcus Fairs, editor-in-chief of Dezeen and one of this year's three design week ambassadors, ran a series of Good Design for a Bad World talks inside a temporary structure called the People's Pavilion. And at Klokgebouw, a converted Philips factory, you could see the latest flood-defense system designed by students at Eindhoven University of Technology, along with paper furniture and stage costumes that the European paper-packaging maker Smurfit Kappa developed with young designers.

On top of that, the World Design Event curatorial team — led by director Martijn Paulen and the week's international project manager, Ingrid Van Der Wacht — added eight themed shows, each standing for a social question designers care about right now: food (The Embassy for Food), health (The Embassy for Health), urban transport (The Embassy for Urban Transformation), big data (The Embassy for Big Data), climate change (The Embassy for Climate Action), intimacy between people (The Embassy for Intimacy), robots (The Embassy for Robots/and Humans), and energy and migration (The Embassy for Mobility and Energy).

Each of the eight themes had its own curator, working with designers and artists in that field. The Embassy of Food, which QDaily has written about before, brought together work by several food designers. The Embassy of Climate Change was put together by a design platform called What Design Can Do, and showed many of the projects designers have come up with in response to a changing climate.

This run of "embassy projects" happens at the design week once every four years, Ingrid told QDaily in an interview. World Design Event (WDE) is a second curatorial team that grew out of the Dutch Design Foundation; its main job is to push exchange between Dutch designers and design and other industries worldwide. This year WDE was formally folded into Dutch Design Week, with two project managers — Ingrid among them — and a full-time staff of 15 planning and arranging the exhibitions and projects.

"I think our design week is already very big," Ingrid said. This was the 15th one she had worked on. "What we are working on now is raising its quality."

To pull in more public attention, every edition since 2012 has had a theme, along with a run of posters, brochures, maps and other spin-offs spread through the streets and alleys of Eindhoven. This year's theme: Stretch.

Several hundred exhibitions, large and small, were scattered across the city, and a single venue often held several shows on different themes. We picked out the richest few for a look at some of the week's best corners.

Design Academy Eindhoven

Every venue in Eindhoven was packed during design week, but the exhibition space converted from the third-floor classrooms of Design Academy Eindhoven, in the city center, was so crowded that it pushed the indoor temperature up by a good three degrees.

The academy's graduation show was made up of undergraduate and graduate work. The undergraduates took up two and a half floors, the graduate students half a floor. A meeting room ran lectures on a different subject every day, attended mostly by students and designers.

For the students, the graduation show is also a brutal test. At the stands ringed three deep by visitors, the makers had to explain how their work functions, what they meant by it and what they had learned, over and over without visible impatience, while handing out cards printed with their contact details and website. At the quieter stands, students stood alone, glancing about at the people walking past.

New materials and social innovation are the two directions students here like best. Bille van Katwijk takes cow stomach as a raw material and, through soaking, drying and dyeing, turns it into a strange-textured new kind of leather that can be made into clothing or handbags.

Kristaps Polïtis's stand was always mobbed. He made a set of geometric instrument parts that come apart, then put their 3D models and instructions online, so that any household with a 3D printer can print them out and let the children put together a sound-making instrument no one else has.

Spunky Webs designed a line of light, stylish mesh fabrics for the men of the future. Lisanne Koning's project caught the eye and explained itself at once: she covered the inside of the relief boxes handed out to refugees with patterns, so that once the supplies are taken out and the box is of no further use, children can turn it inside out and cut and fold along her printed lines to get a simple tabletop game.

The Sectie C Creative Community

Sectie C sits in a factory district on the east side of Eindhoven. Since 2009 it has gone from eight members to a loose creative community of around 200 young designers, artists, musicians and painters. Fresh graduates can rent a small studio here fairly cheaply. Sometimes they have to share a workshop and its machines with others, which turns out to be a way of getting people talking.

During design week, Sectie C welcomed visitors at its gate in a very particular way. The Entrance, an installation, turned an enormous workshop into a pitch-dark room. The only lit things in it were a handful of islands, each carrying different sculptures, household objects, oddly shaped models, furniture and so on. All you had to do was drop a coin into a machine at the entrance flashing red numbers — different coins bought different lengths of music — and it would trigger circuits buried under each "island," setting off a run of rhythmic sounds through the space. The designers had fitted a striking mechanism to one object on every island; once the circuit fires, the mechanism taps the object with a movement an outsider can barely see, and the taps add up to music.

"Because here we each do our own job and at the same time we live together. The island is really meant to describe what our life here is like," said the designer Jelle Mastenbroek. He was one of the sound designers on the piece; Sander Wassink, Michela Castagnaro and the studio OWOW also worked on the show's design.

During Dutch Design Week nearly every studio at Sectie C was open, and visitors could walk straight into the workshops to look at the work and watch people at it. Some studios laid on lunches or dinners for visitors, so that anyone interested in their work or their ideas could sit down and talk face to face.

QDaily has written before about the Precious Plastic exhibition that Dave Hakkens, a Design Academy Eindhoven graduate, staged in an empty Sectie C factory building.

Jelle Mastenbroek, who is known for making playful music-box installations, also showed a series of his own sound pieces, from a cupboard hung on a wall to a whole room in which every piece of furniture makes a sound.

Klokgebouw

Klokgebouw stands in Eindhoven's Strijp-S district and was once one of Philips's factories. Today it is one of Dutch Design Week's main venues, with the exhibitions spilling out of the building onto the open ground around it.

This year the ground floor was split into four zones, filled to an extreme density with about 65 exhibitions and displays on all sorts of subjects.

At the center of the hall was Mind The Step, a show of work by students from 3TU, the alliance of the Netherlands' three technical universities: Eindhoven University of Technology, Delft University of Technology and the University of Twente.

Here you could see all kinds of research projects made by students and student teams: a model of a Hyperloop high-speed train built by Eindhoven students, a pillow robot designed at Twente to soothe your mood, the world's first drone aimed at household chores. The work was loosely sorted into eight categories: cities, design for disaster, design tools, materials, mobility, smart interaction, health tools, VR/AR and wearables.

Klokgebouw also held the biodegradable plastic that the Dutch water authority developed with the design studio Studio Nienke Hoogvliet, which QDaily has reported on before.

The shows at Klokgebouw came in every size, from group displays by a single institution or brand to one-person presentations. If the hall had not been just small enough that you could not easily get lost in it, you might now and then have stopped knowing what you were looking at.

That state of things throws up the odd surprise. Made to Mend is a tiny studio run by the industrial designer Heleen Klopper. She does one thing: mend holes in woolen cloth. Taking her cue from her great-grandmother's knitting notes and from traditional weaving, Klopper worked out a new way of weaving that can repair wool that has been cut, snagged or worn through and written off as useless.

VDMA

VDMA, an art and creative space made out of a large garage, has a conversion story of its own. This year its highlight was, without question, the joint show by the Dutch design research studio Envisions and the Spanish timber company Finsa.

Envisions was founded in late 2015 by two Design Academy Eindhoven graduates, Iwan Pol and Simone Post, together with a group of Dutch designers. They take apart a material using design-research methods, show off its properties through a wide range of techniques, and look for new ways to use it.

Those definitions are broad. In practice, when the Envisions designers start investigating a material, anything can happen. Wood In Progress, the small show they brought to this year's design week, came at wood as a material by way of the techniques used to work it.

What they put on display was not confined to finished, worked timber. It might be a new material made by a particular woodworking method, or offcuts salvaged from that process and put back to use.

The process sounds coolly rational, but what Envisions ended up showing is a riot of color — the most beguiling part of the exhibition. You see different woods worked by different means into materials of many shapes, each with its own grain, feel and color, at once toy-like and as abstract as sculpture. The designers also photographed these wood pieces and made them into posters, hung at the entrance, so that visitors stepped into a world of color before they ever reached the work itself.

Temporary Art Center

This art center was crammed with exhibitions too, from maker spaces to student work from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. The quality was uneven.

One worth singling out is Conscious Creativity, a small show put on here by the Makerversity maker space, with work by four makers based at Makerversity in Amsterdam: colored tiles made from recycled plastic by the studio Polimeer; s.e.T. (Atmospheric Wood), which treats wood surfaces with a new, experimental dyeing method that leaves a speckled grain and a deep, starry blue; a data instrument by the designer Duncan Gidney that, placed at the roadside, makes sound according to how often bicycles pass — an instrument only a city's bicycles can "play"; and a set of wall clocks with faces made of moss, from the studio Noktuku.

Former V&D Warehouse

This building held two of the "embassy projects" brought by World Design Event: the robot embassy (The Embassy for Robots/and Humans) and the big data embassy (The Embassy for Big Data). The show was the fourth in a series of art events curated by the Dutch curator Ine Gevers. The question put by the Robot Love exhibition at Dutch Design Week: can people find love through contact with robots?

Big as the question is, the Robot Love exhibition at design week showed only a few moving robots, among them Pepper, developed by SoftBank. Gevers told visitors on site that a larger, fuller version of the whole Robot Love exhibition would be shown in Eindhoven in 2018.

The other show, The Embassy of Data, was a bit more interesting. Its core was DATAstudio, a three-year project run by the city of Eindhoven with Het Nieuwe Instituut, which has taken part in Dutch Design Week since 2015.

If you had the patience for it, this small show actually laid out the main data-collecting devices now used to monitor human activity: traffic cameras, GPS, air-monitoring equipment, heat sensors, down to the sensors in trash cans that measure how fast the garbage piles up. The question it put: who gets to own this data, and who decides how it is used?

"We think focusing on 'privacy' is itself a problem. Data should be used for democratized research, not owned by large technology companies. How to protect the data itself also deserves wide attention," Linnet Taylor, an assistant professor at Tilburg University who works on the project, explained to visitors on site.

Kazerne

Kazerne is Dutch for "barracks." This complex of art space, gallery, bar and restaurant was converted from an actual barracks, and was founded by two Design Academy Eindhoven graduates, the designers Annemoon Geurts and Koen Rijnbeek.

Kazerne opened in 2014 and now has a hall of more than 740 square meters holding part of the exhibition space, an open kitchen, a bar and restaurant seating. That has made it a favorite gathering place for Eindhoven's designers.

Besides the hall, Kazerne has two smaller exhibition rooms and a roomy back garden. Geurts said the renovation of the whole historic building should be finished by 2018, and that they also plan to open a small hotel here.

During design week Kazerne served as a venue too, squeezing in 11 exhibitions of various sizes. Among them, New Icons, with Annemoon Geurts as artistic director, set out to ask which new design and art talents the Netherlands has produced by the 100th anniversary of De Stijl. Who can carry on from — or even outdo — Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld, who a century ago stood for the country's most important achievements in art and design?

The show gathered work by several important figures in Dutch design: furniture that the much-in-demand designer Marcel Wanders made for the Dutch furniture company Moooi, an installation by Maarten Baas, who won this year's Milan Design Award for best concept, and pieces by Dave Hakkens, Chris Kabel, Atelier NL and others.

The cover image and any photos without a credit were taken on site.