Successful mission at Dutch Design Week 2022

At the end of last month, Eindhoven hosted the 21st Dutch Design Week under the creative direction of veteran Dutch designer, Miriam Van der Lubbe. The no-nonsense theme of the event, ‘Get Set: We’re on a mission’, set the tone, and the response to this rallying cry appears to have been a strongly pragmatic approach to the designed world – less ‘we could, perhaps, if the stars aligned…’ and more ‘let’s make things happen now.’ From the show-stopping solar installation from Marjan van Aubel and symposium by Formafantasma, the weeks’ ambassadors, to the experimental works of Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) graduates and Rising Talents, there was a firm focus on fast-moving social, economic and climactic change, and the will to meet it head on, albeit using the power of poetry to sell it.

Dutch Design Week does things its own sweet way. The design world is made up of a remarkably aligned international community, with its protagonists regularly travelling across borders, and collaborating across cultures. But each country’s approach to laying out its wares for the world to see is often quite different. While some measure the success of their international Design Week by footfall data and the percentage of overseas visitors who come, and then extrapolate those figures into what it means for potential export growth, others, like Van der Lubbe’s Dutch Design Week, measure success by ‘connections made’. Footfall in this 21st year was on a par with pre-pandemic DDWs but nobody was really counting. ‘Good, better, best. Not big, bigger, biggest,’ is the mantra set by Van der Lubbe. Much harder to quantify, but this doesn’t seem to matter.

‘It has become an event with a unique DNA that aims to get the most out of it for participants, and therefore for our society as a whole. Get Set was all about this: on the one hand, we have to brace ourselves for what is coming, on the other, we have to get the setting right to build smart coalitions: work together, share knowledge, meet each other, network.’ To this end, the team experimented by devising mission-driven programming, grouping exhibitors and companies that are working on the same goals. ‘We saw that on specific topics, it had the exact effect we were hoping for: the visitors were better connected with topics they were looking for, and designers synchronised their work and their networks much better,’ says Van der Lubbe.

The events and shows, as ever, were peppered around the town, injecting life into the former factories of Philips and the railways that once dominated the town’s industrial landscape. Circularity and new material invention dominated thinking from the graduate Josefine Andersen, who adapted clothing temporarily into furniture at the always thought-provoking DAE show, to the wild Embassy of Food, where Merle Bergers Studio, Nonhuman Nonsense and students from the Eindhoven University of Technology brought us lab-grown meat and functional foods in their supermarket of the future. New building materials were explored at the Embassy of Circular and Biobased Building – think hemp bricks, tomato skin leather furniture and eggshell flooring – while the potential for bioplastics was also heartily explored among unconventional materials in the No Space for Waste exhibition and beyond.

Re-use was key to several exhibitions – designers Arnout Visser, Teun Zwets and Studio Rens led the way in a show exploring the repurposing of glass, resulting from a collaboration between Make Eindhoven and the National Glass Museum. End-of-life turbine blades were turned into benches by Blade Made, and Juno Brown at the Sectie C creative hub populated by young experimental talent, recontextualised spent tube lights into his own lighting series. The space of designer Piet Hein Eek, ever the master of foraging factory and workshop floors, featured among other things a lounger by Claudy Jongstra made from discarded wool scraps.

This doesn’t mean that poetry wasn’t woven around the pragmatism. ‘The collection is’ at Van Abbemuseum saw trend-forecaster and curator Li Edelkoort’s design collection beautifully married up by theme – whether political engagement, playfulness or loneliness – to the museum’s art collection. At the Kazerne design foundation – a place perennially dedicated to nurturing world-changing alliances between artists, designers, governments, businesses and scientists – solar panel makers Solarge presented new thinking to cut the problematic carbon pay-off period of typical panels from 4 years to 4 months while DDW ambassador Marjan van Aubel beautifully demonstrated how the other problem they suffer – unpopular aesthetics – can be overcome. Her dramatic Solar Pavilion design in collaboration with V8 architects gives them colour and form.

‘We need strategic thinking and design of processes for the complex challenges we are facing,’ says Van der Lubbe. ‘But not without poetry and the power of beauty to communicate it.’ If arresting artistry and tangible progress is the measure of a successful Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven’s crew killed it.

© Architonic

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