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For the first time ever in October 2020, Dutch Design Week (DDW) followed many of the year’s other design events into taking place in an entirely online format because of government restrictions put in place for COVID-19.  Over the course of the week, the festival offered 3D viewing rooms, live streams, video content and their own DDW TV. 

 The theme of the 2020 edition was “The New Intimacy”, a fitting title for a festival that had itself to find new ways of reaching its audience. Designers, makers and critical thinkers responded to the theme by looking at the impact of the global pandemic on how we live, work and socialise. 

 Here, we look at just a few of the talented designers who exhibited their work virtually this year. 

This year’s health pandemic has thrown into sharp focus many of the social problems that we were already aware: global healthcare, the climate crisis, poverty, and inequality. In keeping with the DDW theme, many of the progressive projects included in the programme touch on the search for intimacy and connection by looking at new ways you can bring people together, include the excluded, and provide care and support where it is lacking. 

Today’s designers shoulder great responsibility. Armed with a better understanding of the potential damage of consumerism and with ever-changing and advancing technologies, the next generation of creatives have the opportunity to work with different design philosophies and perhaps repair some of the harm that has been done to our world and it’s inhabitants. Sustainability is often at the forefront of the minds of designers, and was certainly a trend in the work shared this year. 

Much of the graduate work included in the DDW programme  – including from the Design Academy Eindhoven and the antenna 2020 – offers some great inspiration and insight into how the designers of tomorrow are finding solutions to today’s big problems. 

The antenna Conference, curated by international design platform Design Indaba, comprises 10 graduate design projects from the world’s best design schools. Each of the projects looks to address at least one of the Sustainable Development Goals put forward by the United Nations. Brunel University graduate Solveiga Pakštaitė’s Mimica Touch is a tactile use-by label that could radically reduce food waste by providing realtime, accurate information on food spoilage.

RISD graduate Fengjiao Ge’s project Flowing Garments rethinks how waste produced by the fast fashion industry could be used in landscape design and construction, while in Plus Minus 25º Anna Koppmann and Esmée Willems explore low-tech solutions for temperature regulation with curtains printed with phase changing material.

The Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) hosts the annual graduation show
during DDW, and the students’ projects can still be viewed on the DAE website. Graduate Hannah Segerkrantz’s
project Hemp-it-Yourself aims to encourage the use of natural
materials and local, on-demand production using commercially
grown hemp.
Baptiste Comte’s Mementum is a series of ceramic cremation urns that mimic the organic movement of living, growing material to celebrate the uniqueness of every human life. 

Outside of the graduate exhibitions Comte’s urns were the not only project to address death. The Living Coffin by Bob Hendrix and Loop Biotech looks at creating a new relationship between human death and the restoration of the natural world with a coffin made of mycelium. 

Biomaterials and living, growing fabrics were certainly one of the hottest trends from this year’s festival. Many designers showcased the possibilities and beauty of bio-based materials with works that used algae as well as fungi. 

The group exhibition Materialized made use of many of these organic substances and explored the use of waste and sustainable material alternatives. Participating studio KUNST-S investigates the use of recycled plastic as a design material in “The Beauty of Plastic Waste”. This looks at giving plastic the same aesthetic qualities as stone, marble or ceramic to increase its perceived value. 

A second group exhibition named Non(Depleted) also looked at natural resources and intended to provoke conversation around the extraction and exhaustion of the earth’s resources. The designers experimented with industrial waste, biomaterials and living organisms. The Bio Iridescent Sequin by Elissa Brunato, for example, is a compostable and shimmering alternative sequin for the fashion industry made from renewable cellulose instead of plastic. Algae as Building Blocks by Claudia Bumb looks at the potential of algae as a future building material.

The installation TogetherTwentyTwenty by Martina Taranto is a series of sculptures built with biomaterial invented by Taranto called Viral Nature that can host life, and small grass and weeds begin to grow out of it over time. The installation aims to create a bridge between the human and the natural world by asking us to remember to coexist in harmony with the ecosystems we occupy. 

DDW ambassador Dutch trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort gave her annual talk on design trends as well as putting together the exhibition New Melancholy with the Van Abbemuseum and Kazerne. In the essay accompanying the exhibition, Edelkoort writes that lockdown has left us with a vast emptiness. Other talks during DDW featured designer Sabine Marcelis, and Philips’ Chief Design Officer Sean Carney — on tactility in the digital age and the future of healthcare.. 

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Thank you for reading,
Katie De Klee & Cluster Team.