Preparation is everything: Dutch Design Week asks us to ‘Get Set’

‘In Eindhoven, we do things together,’ reads a poster at the city’s airport, greeting international visitors to Dutch Design Week with friendly open arms. It’s a fitting message that portrays the festival’s optimistic theme, ‘Get Set’, a call to arms to the world’s technologists, creators and policymakers to tackle humanity’s massing global issues, by joining as one.

While material and scientific research is always key for emerging tech to birth innovative solutions, the real drivers of change are the people themselves. Trust and acceptance of technology can be a far bigger stumbling block than anything as pliable as science. So if the latest environmental architecture and design solutions are to have an effect on the world as we know it, we need to talk, listen and work, together. Here are some of the most inspirational, thought-provoking lessons to emerge from Eindhoven to pass on.

In any walk of design, be it product, environment, business or even global civilisation, if we were to start again, what would we do different? Why, for example, would we harmfully generate energy solely from non-renewable resources, while a far larger, cleaner resource goes to waste? Marjan van Aubel’s Sunne installation at Dutch Design Week 2022 entered visitors into a more understanding relationship with everyone’s favourite celestial body. The solar-powered lights change their output to imitate how humanity is at the mercy of the sun, but doesn’t have to be, featuring both solar cells and an integrated battery for 24-hour use.

Although converting solar energy into usable energy is more efficient than ever, a solar surface can sometimes come by sacrificing aesthetics. A beacon in Dutch Design Week’s Ketelhuisplein, however, Solar Designer Marjan van Aubel’s and V8 Architects' Solar Pavilion showed we don’t need to choose. The pavilion’s curved solar roof of coloured photo-voltaic tiles, arranged in a pattern to mimic the beauty of a sunrise, allows the protective surface to reach its full energy-harvesting potential too.

By using solar cells as a construction material at the initial design stages – as opposed to nailing panels on to pre-built structures as an afterthought – we get more environmental, more beautiful and more efficient future-ready solutions, simply by rethinking the process from the start. If we were to apply the same concept to other building practices, large and small, what would the results be?

The Corkbrick system, for example, can be used to form internal architectural elements such as walls, staircases and fitted furniture, then dismantled and recreated in other arrangements – without tools – when required. The WoW House also suggests a similar method on a larger scale, allowing homeowners to increase and change space typologies as their needs change.

On an even larger scale, meanwhile, the architecture and engineering company Sweco, experts in urban infrastructure and planning, answered the question ‘What if our cities were self-sufficient?’ in their Totally Local report. The concept suggests future cities could serve the health and wellbeing of their residents with integrated greenery, energy production and circular farms.

Blade Made, a start-up that re-purposes end-of-life wind turbine blades for use in public environments, showed that re-use is a better option than recycling at Dutch Design Week, but both are far better than building new. With urban environments only expected to expand over the next 30 years, however, building new is unavoidable. Four environmental housing projects set out their stalls in Dutch Design Week’s Ketelhuisplein, to suggest ways we can build new, but build better.

Roomy is a pre-fabricated garden office unit made from saw residue, bringing additional interior space without environmental impact. While the Nomad House is a similarly compact structure, it is self-contained with built-in furniture and enclosed plumbing and electrics, allowing it to be transported. The Rotor Home, meanwhile, is transformable living that opens up, quite literally, to its environment, with a pivoting wall enabling genuine outdoor living. And Unselfish Cabins is concept housing from Fé Ramakers, which combines the role of the residence with that of urban social structures such as bridges, bus stops or even public toilets.

At Dutch Design Week’s fascinating, salivating and equally terrifying Embassy of Food at Klokgebow, designers gave a glimpse of what our supermarkets might look like in 2050 – including lab-grown meat- and fish-flavoured foods – but this wasn’t the only exhibition predicting the rise of cultured materials.

The Embassy of Circular & Biobased Building presented a scale model of its Exploded View Beyond Building, encouraging visitors to build their own patchwork home with a variety of bio-based materials currently in development, including hemp bricks, grass insulation, eggshell flooring, mycelium acoustic tiles, mussel shell laminate, self-healing fungal paint and tomato-skin leather furniture.

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