In the Netherlands, How Does One of the World's Best Design Schools Run?

The central idea is "the different relationships people form with their environment and with objects."

In 2008, an article in The New York Times titled A School for New Dutch Masters quoted Murray Moss, founder of the design consultancy Moss Bureau, calling Design Academy Eindhoven "currently the best design school in the world."

In December 2016, on design website Dezeen's list of the year's hottest design schools, Design Academy Eindhoven came third, behind the Royal College of Art and the Bartlett School of Architecture.

The school was born in 1947, just as the Netherlands was starting to rebuild after the Second World War. To stimulate consumption and create jobs, the government wanted to train designers who could make objects that were useful, good-looking, and suited to mass industrial production. Design, at the time, was seen as a tool of social progress, a way of expressing function. That is why the school's first name was in fact the Eindhoven Academy of Industrial Design (Academie voor Industriële Vormgeving Eindhoven, or AIVE).

For roughly its first 30 years, the school admitted students only from the Netherlands. After the 1970s it opened admissions to the whole world, and 35 years ago it threw out the traditional way of organizing departments by design category — industrial design, fashion design, graphic design and so on — for the unusual structure people see today: the eight undergraduate departments are Man and Well-being, Man and Leisure, Man and Communication, Public Private, Man and Activity, Food Non Food, Man and Mobility, and Man and Identity. Food Non Food is the newest of them, opened four years ago, and this year it saw its first class graduate.

An article in the Financial Times called this arrangement "genuinely humanist."

The change freed Design Academy Eindhoven from its old identity as an industrial design school and made it a place for exploring conceptual design — one big reason it vaulted into the ranks of famous design institutions. It states plainly that the fundamental purpose of design is to put people first, and that the different directions branching off from that are "the different relationships people form with their environment and with objects." The structure lets students look at design itself from a new angle.

One thing this school's energy produced is Dutch Design Week, now in its 16th edition and one of Europe's most important design events. Unlike better-known design events such as Milan's, it is notable for how sharply it attends to social and environmental questions.

This year's Eindhoven graduation show was made up of work by 161 graduates: 48 from the master's programs and 113 undergraduates.

A week before it opened, floors three to five of the school's main building in downtown Eindhoven were emptied out. The school brought in the Italian design duo Formafantasma — Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, themselves graduates of the class of 2009 — to curate. The two not only teach at the school but also curated the 2016 graduation show. The school hired eight photographers as well, to shoot every piece on display. The photographs will be gathered into a thick catalogue for the 2017 Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show, and posted one by one on the school's website.

Follow the route the curators laid out and you end up at the fifth-floor café, where the show ends and where you can buy the catalogue.

The whole graduation show is mature and efficient; apart from the fact that every exhibitor is a student, it differs little from a carefully curated museum exhibition. It is also the most important show within Dutch Design Week, held every October, and it draws close to 300,000 visitors from around the world.

A School Made Alluring by "Concept"

"A lot of people are a little confused by our department names when they first come to our graduation show. Honestly, sometimes we're not so clear on them ourselves," said Igor Daemen, from Man and Mobility, speaking to QDaily.

His piece is a set of coffee tables: reclaimed old oak furniture, cut apart and rejoined with aluminum strips. Daemen studied exhibition design at Sint Lucas, a technical school in Eindhoven, and came here hoping to widen his thinking. "Students in any department here could make the same kind of work. What differs is the identity they make it under, or the reason they make it."

Plenty of students, like Daemen, came for that unusual department structure. Julica Morlok, a German student in Man and Identity, found design education in Germany too weighted toward function, aimed at designs that could be mass-produced by industry.

Eindhoven, by contrast, "is very conceptual. What matters here is the theory behind an idea." Sara Kadesch, who studied fashion design in Berlin and then came to Eindhoven for a master's in social design, put it this way: "In Germany, if you study fashion, you research fashion. Here, if you study fashion, you can research architecture."

The four-year undergraduate course at Design Academy Eindhoven is one year of basic skills followed by three years of specialized study. The ground floor holds workshops kitted out to work fabric, ceramics, wood, metal, stone, electronic components and more — in the school's own slogan, the only thing you can't make here is something you can't think of. In the first year, students mainly learn how to make things. From the second year they pick a department according to their own interests. Every department is open to every other: students can seek out whatever mentor they need, and can change departments again partway through.

Don Norman, the well-known American cognitive scientist and a founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, argues that because design schools tend to have grown out of art schools, design students have long been weak at understanding and executing in science and engineering, while students trained as engineers know only how to solve problems and lack creative ability. In a conversation with a reporter from MIT Technology Review, he proposed that design students get a STEM education — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — during their foundation years. And those four disciplines, he argued, need "design" just as much.

"Universities scoff at generalists," Norman said. "But the people who create great products and services have to be generalists. Good designers shouldn't rush to solve a problem. They need to ask first: 'Is this the problem that needs solving?' They need to know a little about everything, enough to consult the right expert about any one of them, enough to combine across narrow specialties and create novel, exciting products and services."

This loose-looking way of studying comes, of course, with a high rate of attrition. "Taking five years over an undergraduate degree is common at this school," Wu Jiayu, who did her undergraduate degree in home product design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and is now studying Social Design here, told QDaily. Fail a course and you have to retake it; fail it again and the school will advise you to repeat the year.

What Are the Students Thinking About?

Mirjam de Bruijn, from Amsterdam, took five years to graduate; her department is Man and Activity. But this year her project Twenty made it onto a good number of design websites before the show even opened. Her idea: take the water out of the detergents, shampoos and cleaning products we use every day, which are more than 80% water, and sell concentrated solid balls or blocks instead. Consumers buy those, take them home and add water in the right proportion themselves. That cuts packaging costs sharply, and shipping costs too.

Marc Ruis, a spokesperson for Design Academy Eindhoven, thinks the school's variety brings students a great deal that is new to them, and a lot of exchange between different points of view. "We have 750 students in all right now — 600 undergraduates and 150 in the master's programs — and they come from 60 different countries," Ruis said. "That's why, at the graduation show, you can see Nadine Botha taking on the question of public toilets in South Africa while Chinese students look at the relationship between individual consciousness and collectivism."

"The school encourages 'concept design.' Students don't have to design a product. They can design 'design' itself — a system, an object, a problem. Our definition of 'design' is a broad one," Ruis said.

Students trained on that thinking have a recognizable character. They are good at design research and at making, and they stay keenly interested in social questions.

QDaily has written about AtelierNL; about Envisions, the design research studio that works with the Spanish timber company Finsa; about Dave Hekkens, who started the Precious Plastic project; and about the "strange" designer Chritien Meindertsma, who made a book about every product a single pig ends up in. They share traits: they are good at design research that misses no detail, they love chasing the nature and origin of a material or a thing, and they can hand their findings to an audience by a method that is clear in its logic, good to look at, and complete.

Eindhoven's graduates include no shortage of commercially successful designers. Earlier ones include Bertjan Pot, who designed Moooi's famous The Random Light, and Gijs Bakker, who founded the design brand Droog; more recently Marcel Wanders and Maarten Baas have shown what they can do at the Milan furniture fair.

"Marcel Wanders came to see the show a couple of days ago. He thought our work was interesting." The speaker was a tall, blond young man, a third-year undergraduate at Design Academy Eindhoven. When we talked, he was helping an older student, Tamara Van Roji, an undergraduate finishing in Man and Communication, explain her work at the 2017 Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show.

Their piece is a rug with a magenta shimmer. Walk a couple of steps around the stand, look at it from another angle, and it turns a different color. Tamara borrowed the technique used for embroidered badges, weaving three layers of rayon yarn in the three RGB colors — yellow, magenta and cyan — into a fabric whose color changes with the angle you view it from and the light falling on it.

"This rug imitates an electronic device — the brightly colored, addictive screen that entertains you on an iPad, a smartphone, a laptop. ... The Flux Rug shows that a traditional piece of home furnishing can still belong in this digital age; might it even rescue us from our addiction to screens?" reads the description of the piece, which is called Flux Rug.

"Volkswagen liked our work too. They thought it might make a new kind of car seat fabric," he went on.

The day was October 27, the seventh day of the show. All 400 of the brown flyers on Tamara's stand had been taken, so she taped the last one to the stand with clear tape and apologetically asked later visitors to photograph her project information and contact details.

The school prints a stack of these flyers, all to one design, for every graduating exhibitor. They sit on every stand, and any visitor interested in a piece can tear one off to keep, like a sheet from a pad of sticky notes. Each one states the maker's name, department, project title and a short description. Most of the students in the show had also printed their own business cards, which come in every possible form — one more expression of the maker's style.

Wu Jiayu's card was distinctive too: a slightly crumpled but thick sheet of translucent tracing paper, faintly printed with the design of her European student ID card.

Eindhoven's thinking hit her hard. "Compared with the undergraduate course, which is more about practice and making, the master's course tends to ask students to put forward a concept, and trains them in storytelling. The work that comes out at the end often sits somewhere between design and art."

Wu Jiayu's piece is a frame of steel tubing and leather straps that fastens onto a person's body so that a second person can work the wearer's movements like a puppet's. It looks like some odd steampunk-era medical device, and the leather straps call to mind the restraints used to pen animals. "Even living in an age of strong self-awareness, an age that wants to mark the individual self off from the group, we are still controlled," Wu Jiayu wrote in her project description. Beside her steel control frame she also made a video assembled from clips of square dancing, every dancer in step.

"After I graduate I still want to go home to China and work as an independent artist. So much is changing there now; there must be plenty of interesting things going on," Wu Jiayu said.

What Happens After Graduation?

"We really are very poor," said Yildau ter Beek, a graduate of Food Non Food, with a helpless laugh. "After you graduate, of course the first thing is to earn back the money you spent on the graduation project, and then find an independent way to do your own design. The income might come from government-funded projects or from working with big companies, or you do a paying job during the day and use what time is left over to design."

Even so, she firmly agrees with the concept-design thinking the school advocates. "We don't need more things, we don't need more consumer goods," she said. "But we do need to improve relationships, so that people and things each find the direction that suits them."

Bas Sala, a designer who runs his own studio in Rotterdam, graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven 17 years ago. He thinks the school still pays too little attention to technology and interaction. "Design in future definitely won't be something that ends once it has been bought and sold. We can now collect much more user data, so we can keep improving our products."

The Dutch designer Esther Jongsma set up her studio in Sectie C, an innovation district on the east side of the city. During this year's Dutch Design Week she opened VANTOT, the lighting studio she founded with Sam Van Gurp, to visitors, showing their newest lamp designs.

"We really like Sectie C — there's a lot of choice here. Right after we graduated from design school we couldn't afford a studio this size, so we shared a small one with other people. Later the products did well, and that let us rent the big studio we have now."

Eindhoven, on the whole, is a city remarkably tolerant of design. Here we have to mention Philips. As LEGO is to Billund in Denmark and IKEA is to Älmhult in Sweden, Philips is a dominant presence in Eindhoven — leaving the Eindhoven football club aside for the moment.

Philips made the city's present design climate in two stages. The first was the electronics manufacturing giant getting its start here. The second was 1997, when Philips moved its headquarters to Amsterdam and the town was suddenly left with a great many empty offices and factories. Young designers got cheap studios, workshops and labs out of it, and those spaces and the designers gradually grew into a symbiotic relationship.

The curator Andrea Trimarchi has a tongue-twister of a line for it: "The city of Eindhoven is itself an excellent example of how a city recovers from the trauma caused by the departure of an entire industrial ecosystem, represented by Philips."

Some people, of course, just say the plain thing. "I think because Eindhoven is a pretty boring place, it helps you concentrate on your studies," said Mirjam de Bruijn, the student who "squeezed" all the water out of her graduation project.

Cover image from ddw.nl. The long cover image and any images in the text without a credited source were photographed on site.