Week of October 19, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: furniture inspired by robots, our favorites from the 2020 Design Academy Eindhoven graduate shows, and a carpeted chair by Max Lamb that's apropos for COVID life.
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Dutch Design Week 2019

30 Projects We Loved from Dutch Design Week 2019

A feeling of urgency pervaded this year's Dutch Design Week. It was clear from many of the works on show that the focus of the designer is shifting; no longer is good aesthetic judgment and a well-designed clever product the aspiration. Ego and vision are going out of style, to be replaced by attempts to understand the inter-connected systems in which design sits.
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This Dutch Design Duo Ignores What’s “Right” in Their Quest to Make Something Perfect

Over the last few years, the Dutch studio RENS has been busy building a diverse portfolio of experimental yet resolved and alluring designs. Each project they undertake breathes new life into familiar processes and is approached from a purposefully uninformed standpoint. In fact, by knowing less about a production method and the way things “should be done,” they find the beauty and potential in rejects and mistakes.
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Dutch Design Week 2018 Raw Color

35 Designers We Loved at Dutch Design Week 2018

The theme for Dutch Design Week 2018 was “If not us, then who?" — which says a lot about the current state of affairs in the world but also about the progressive and responsible spirit that lies at the core of the Dutch design scene. Here are some of our favorite finds from across the city.
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A Dutch Duo’s Albers-Inspired Acrylic Boxes

Over the past few weeks, we've been working on a little project about Josef Albers, so the idea that color might function as a material has been front and center in our minds. And perhaps no contemporary studio's work has pushed color into as defining a role as the Dutch duo Raw Color. Their latest project, a series of acrylic boxes whose multicolored planes intersect and blend into one other, is one of their best to date and pushes color even further into Albers territory.
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The 40+ Biggest Breakout Talents at Dutch Design Week 2017

When we first covered Dutch Design Week back in 2012, arts funding in the Netherlands had been slashed and the Design Academy Eindhoven had gone through a major directorial shake-up, making us worry that the halcyon days of Dutch design might be nearing an end. Five years later, though, we're happy to report that no such thing has occurred. Have a look at this year's Dutch Design Week mega-roundup to see what we mean.
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Dutch Design Week 2017 - Hardcore Exhibition

At Dutch Design Week, 17 Designers Turning Everyday Materials into Sculptural Furniture

It’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, and we'll be publishing a round-up of our favorites first thing next week. But for the second year in a row, one of the best exhibitions on view came from the young trend-forecasting and design firm Core Studio, who last year curated the colorful exhibition Popcore. This year, the theme was HARDCORE, and the curators asked participating designers to create works exploring "a counter-digital movement."
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Our Top Finds From Dutch Design Week 2016

It’s been fifteen years since the first-ever Dutch Design Week, and since then, Eindhoven’s 10-day celebration has seen both highs (international success and prestige) and lows (the slashing of arts funding as well as high-profile resignations from the esteemed Design Academy). What has stayed constant is the country’s ability to remain relevant in response to new challenges and issues and the city's reputation for churning out some of the next best design talents.
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2015 Dutch Design Week

At the 2015 Dutch Design Week

We made the rounds in Eindhoven this year in order to scout out our favorite projects from an event that consistently introduces top emerging talents into the European design scene. Here's our guide to the names and projects to know from DDW 2015.
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Union of Striped Yarns by Dienke Dekker

People always ask us which design fair is on our can't-miss list, and though we've never been able to make it there ourselves, we're inclined at this point to say Dutch Design Week. The work on show there is consistently kind of epic, with future design superstars springing almost fully formed each year from the Design Academy Eindhoven (see Formafantasma, Julien Carretero, and Nacho Carbonell, to name a few). Next on that list might be Dienke Dekker, a 2012 graduate whose material explorations we're featuring today. For her project the Union of Striped Yarns, which debuted at last year's DDW, Dekker used a variety of yarns — hand-dyed, industrial-printed and even non-traditional "threads" like caution tape — to explore striped patterning in textiles. Different colored and white spaces, combined with a variety of weaving methods, created the gorgeous effects on view here.
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Objects for Sale, at Dutch Design Week

In our recap of the most recent Dutch Design Week on Monday, we alluded to the economic quagmire that’s been enveloping the Netherlands' insanely prolific creative class. But one of the week’s exhibitions actually addressed the crisis head-on: Objects for Sale, which asked eight designers to create products within three price brackets (<€50, €50-500, >€500) and to explain how choices within their design and production processes affected the bottom line.
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At the 2012 Dutch Design Week

It's been a tough two years for Dutch design. First a newly elected right-wing government slashed the tiny country's legendary arts funding, causing seemingly irreparable damage to its institutions and grant programs, and then a series of high-profile resignations called into question the inner workings of Eindhoven's hallowed Design Academy. But even if there are signs that the fairy-tale may not last — that creativity and experimentalism can't elude the death-grip of capitalism forever, even in a place where designers still benefit from squatters' rights — we still look forward to Dutch Design Week as a reminder of the happier consequences of those values. While we couldn't attend this year ourselves, we asked our faithful contributor Marco Tabasso, who's second-in-command at Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan, to report back on his experiences at the festival — from his mixed feelings about the Design Academy show to the paella dinner he and Rossana shared with Nacho Carbonell in the designer's studio, above.
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