Dutch Design Week is known for bringing out the best and most original student design. This year, that included broom weapons, a swinging oven and a Chinese censorship detector.
Students come from all over the world to study at the Netherlands’ more than 30 design schools. And every October, all of those schools – plus several from Europe – make their way to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week.
This year’s edition was no exception, with high-achieving students dominating the exhibition spaces with works that challenge, inspire and push the boundaries of design. Here, contributing editor Rima Sabina Aouf shares eight of her favourites.
Photo by Femke Reijerman
Tenderlymilitant.exe by Anna Zoe Hamm, Design Academy Eindhoven
Both completely original in concept and finely crafted in execution, Anna Zoe Hamm‘s bachelor project centres on a series of four broomstick-weapon hybrids. This broom armoury is, on the one hand, a study in material culture, incorporating the object’s historical links with female labour, witch-related symbolism and use in martial arts into a sculptural representation.
On the other hand, it is a deconstruction of the idea of weapons themselves, proposing that we think of care and nurture as exerting an equally strong force as violence. To this end, Hamm has looked to plants with their quiet defence systems as inspiration for elements of the brooms’ designs.
Hamm refers to the project as “a weapon armoury for the queer-feminist counter apocalypse”, and – as if that weren’t already a compellingly stacked tower of ideas – she has also devised choreography to “activate” the objects based on her martial arts training.
Tenderlymilitant.exe was exhibited in the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate exhibition and in Basic Instinct: Making-With at Kazerne.
Roto P1 by Gijs Hennen, Academie Minerva
Design graduate Gijs Hennen‘s Roto P1 project made a huge impression as it swung back and forth in the Class of 25 exhibition at the Klokgebouw.
Hennen’s focus are large-scale, machine-based installations that demystify some aspect of industrial and factory processes. In this case, the process is rotational moulding, and the object is a household oven that forms the bottom of a pendulum, launching mesmerically through the air.
Inside the oven is a rotating mould, which Henne uses to produce the Roto P1 lamp – a fully realised product that is available to buy from his website.
Hennen also had a second, completely different project on display as part of the Manifestations exhibition, where he was nominated for a Young Talent Award. His contribution, titled Meat Machine, is a cluttering, visceral representation of industrial animal slaughter.
Roto P1 was exhibited in the Klokgebouw and Meat Machine at Manifestations.
Photo by Ruud Balk
Back to the Flax #4 by the Back to the Flax collective, Design Academy Eindhoven
Back to the Flax is a collective of 10 students from the Design Academy Eindhoven who have taken over an agricultural plot on the outskirts of the city to cultivate flax – an ultra-renewable plant that was historically widely grown and used in this part of the world.
This project is a slow one, spanning multiple years and focusing on the revival of lost knowledge and production processes with a view towards regenerative design and community building. The students’ installation addresses the challenges of being at the midway point – they have successfully grown and harvested flax, but the means to process it locally are patchy at best.
As such, the hairy, totemic forms they displayed this year feature either unprocessed or part-processed flax. While ostensibly unfinished, this material has an allure of its own, particularly as onion bulb-like pendant lighting, topped with brushy buds.
After the exhibition, the objects can be disassembled and processing continued when the designers are ready.
Back to the Flax was exhibited at Basic Instinct: Making-With at Kazerne.
Photo by Lili Cirksena
Waiting for the Bus by Luca Ortmann, Berlin University of the Arts
Few people have stopped to consider how sad temporary bus stops are – usually nothing more than an unsheltered signpost on a blank stretch of pavement, signalling that your routine is being disrupted and nobody cares.
But product design graduate Luca Ortmann cared and came up with a system of clever, easy-to-deploy street furniture. His friendly, curving tubular steel structures are based on places where people like to linger, such as window ledges and bike racks, with the aim to bring a bit of joy into the everyday.
In Ortmann’s world, transit places offer us moments to pause and reflect, and design should visually emphasise that.
Waiting for the Bus was exhibited at Next, Now, Then, the German design graduates exhibition at skate park Area 51.
Photo by Pierre Castignola
Depicting Dark Waters by Alice Baker, Design Academy Eindhoven
Graduate Alice Baker had two of the most beautiful projects on show at Dutch Design Week, both in glass.
In Depicting Dark Waters, she presented lifelike, painstakingly detailed models of deep-sea corals – work that is useful to scientists because these animals are rarely seen and can’t just be brought to the surface. By engaging in this work, she connects to a long history of scientific glass model-making, now a largely forgotten craft.
In What We Are, she explored similar ideas but on a different scale. A eukaryotic cell – the fundamental building block of complex life – was exploded to thousands of times its size, its organelles dancing above our heads in an illuminated ceiling installation.
Baker has only been working in glass for about a year. The finesse of her creations is just one indication that she is a talent to watch.
Alice Baker’s work was shown at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show and at Basic Instinct: Making-With at Kazerne.
Freehabilitation by the University of Twente
Anyone who’s ever recovered from an injury will know how difficult it is to stay motivated to do the repetitive rehabilitation exercises. That problem is only amplified if you’re recovering from a stroke.
To that end, a team of students and researchers from the University of Twente, led by assistant professor of interaction design Armağan Karahanoğlu, has designed Freehabilitation – a series of implements that facilitate hand rehabilitation at home while the user undertakes everyday tasks.
There’s a cup that lights up according to how hard you squeeze it, an electric toothbrush that keeps twisting so you have to adjust your wrist angle, and reinvented versions of a spatula and a computer mouse.
Freehabilitation was exhibited within the 4TU Design United Expo at the Klokgebouw.
Photo by Philipp Remus
Felt the Future by Philipp Remus, Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences
In a year when wool formed a running thread throughout Dutch Design Week, industrial design graduate Philipp Remus stood out for the depth of his research.
As well as developing two attractive shoe prototypes made entirely from wool, which could be appealingly easy to return to the earth, he aims to push open the door for new uses of wool, which in the European context is currently a low-valued, near-waste byproduct of sheep farming for meat and dairy.
His research explores the biodegradability of wool soles and the air‑purifying potential of abraded wool fibres, laying the groundwork for potential future development.
Felt the Future was exhibited at Next, Now, Then, the German design graduates exhibition at skate park Area 51.
Photo by Carlfried Verwaayen
How to Catch the Fire Dragon by Kai-Hsiang Wen, Design Academy Eindhoven
Among many impressive installations at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show, one of the most engaging was this work by contextual design master’s graduate Kai-Hsiang Wen, involving a dozen or so old stereos with antennas extended high into the air.
The work focuses on the Chinese government’s practice of jamming foreign radio broadcasts, especially transmissions from Taiwan, by broadcasting Chinese opera pieces via satellite. This jamming signal has come to unofficially be known as Firedrake, or the fire dragon, due to its sound pattern.
Wen’s creation is a modified radio antenna that physically sways in response to incoming jamming signals, functioning as a censorship detector and making “invisible geopolitical tensions in the airwaves perceptible”. It also exemplifies a year where designers were keen to expose the hidden power structures behind our technologies, in both the East and West.
The post Eight of the best avant-garde student projects from Dutch Design Week appeared first on Dezeen.