What I’ve learnt at DDW17
From October 21st to 29th, Eindhoven was the host of the 16th Dutch Design Week, with more than 610 exhibitions, presentations, tours and activities in 110 locations spread across the city. “Cerise sur le gâteau”, the city also welcomed the World Design Week this year, which meant, even more events, talks, and discoveries.
Too bad, I’ve only been able to spend one single day there, but for sure, next year, I will try to stay longer: I left Eindhoven with the impression that I’ve only experienced a small part of the whole show.
The whole thing had a World’s fair taste, where creative minds from all over the country showcase their ideas and concepts to a broad audience. The attendance was way beyond the average design-geeks since the event welcomed more than 335,000 visitors in 9 days this year.
The range of topics covered was also super-impressive: from how we eat, love or meet, to urban planning, the design of objects and services, and even loaded themes like death, you’re sure to find food for your thoughts.
Watching futuristic projects like VRPodia or Sam, a “Symbiotic Autonomous Machine”, I couldn’t help thinking about the crazy inventions presented at Paris’ “Exposition Universelles” in the XIXth century, where visionary inventors demonstrated their moving sidewalks, lawn mowers or new fabrics.
Even if it’s almost impossible, to sum up, the incredible burgeoning of ideas featured during DDW17, I’ve noticed three areas where designers and exhibitors were particularly creative.
1/ Everyone will be a maker…some day
You think the “maker movement” was just a fad? Yes, a few years ago, 3D printers promoters imagined a future where everyone would have such a device at home, to create their own product. It’s easy to see that the trend never took off, and 3D printing usages remain mostly industrial.
Nevertheless, the “maker culture” is still a real trend, and it’s on the rise, as people aspire to get more personalized objects and have more meaningful consumption.
In Eindhoven, this DIY culture was obvious in areas as diverse as gardening, robotics or furnishings, with companies like IKEA running workshops for kids, or with a “shelter for abandoned robots” where you could repair your broken devices, for instance.
I’ve also seen several designers’ projects related to partly home-made and totally customizable furniture. Family W is one of those: created by two brothers, the company aims at providing all the tools to build and paint your very own stool, cabinet or cupboard.
As they explain on their website: “we select the best wood, saw the joints, and provide glue, paint and clear instruction. You build, hammer, glue the parts and paint it. Maybe you make the paint a little lighter, just because you like it that way. Or you make a dent in the side of the cabinet because your hammer accidentally misses the wooden plug. But it is alright because that is what makes it your cabinet. And everyone can do it.” The pigments for the paint are sourced in the US, the only place where the two brothers could find the tones and the chemical-free formula they wanted.
The “maker movement” is not limited to making your own objects: it’s also about reconnecting to your local environment. For instance, via a local currency, like Wilde Munt, a project in development in Amsterdam, co-constructed with designers, residents, and businesses.
Another example was Woenseltopia, a serious game which asked: “Imagine waking up in Woensel-Noord one day, and a mysterious wall appeared, making it impossible for the neighborhoods to leave for nine years. How would you recreate the city?” Then, the 20 participants have to make decisions based on data, about food, social issues, and spatial planning.
Even more forward-thinking (not to say “absurd”), you might soon be able to make your own drinking water (from your urine), thanks to Tim Verbakel’s “Ultimate Bottle”, or to manage your DIY “birth” at home, with the “Birth Box”, a kit that contains everything you need for a home-delivery, designed as an artistic stance to protest healthcare budget cuts in the UK.
2/ We should think twice before eating meat, fish and even eggs
Across the city, many projects were hosted inside so-called “embassies”: there was an “Embassy of Robot Love”, an “Embassy of Health”, an “Embassy of Data” and even an “Embassy of Intimacy”. The “Embassy of Food” was the most impressive one, with dozens of projects featured to propose solutions to build a more sustainable food supply chain.
The most obvious trend, also linked to the “maker movement”, is urban and home farming, illustrated by countless devices to grow your own food that were featured everywhere. Wandering in the massive Veemgebouw building, converted into an office and exhibition space, I even run upon a sizeable urban farm.
On the fifth floor of this former Philips’ warehouse, Duurzame Kost demonstrated how aquaponics can grow 1,5 tons of vegetables a month on 1200 m2 in the middle of the city, thus reducing transport costs and impact on the environment. The project is supported by Philips City Farming, a new division of the (Dutch) electronic giant.
Maybe soon, we’ll replace our meat with “oyster mushroom” sausages? Or with “fake fish”? And why not adapting our teeth for a vegetarian diet?
Doreen Westphal, the founder of Botanic Bites, the company that invented a new use for oyster mushrooms (or “Pleurotus ostreatus”), explains she got the idea back in 2016, at DDW, where speed dates were organized between farmers and designers. “The mushrooms are harvested in bunches, so you’re left with something. That is too chewy to sell, so no one uses it. But in the vegetable food you need something to chew” she says.
Doreen is also a storyteller, and she likes to give a twist to her products, to attract more attention. Since on a piece of land, you can grow up to fifteen times more vegetable proteins than animal proteins, she imagined a 1,5-meter sausage of oyster mushrooms, which you can only eat with fifteen people.
And did you know that even eating eggs is ethically problematic? To get eggs, thousands of (male) roosters need to be killed, often gasified or shredded within a day after their birth. Since the species used for eggs and meat are not the same, it wouldn’t be efficient to keep them alive for their meat. One solution, promoted by one of the exhibitors: to identify males in the eggs, and destroy them before they are born.
3/ We need artists and designers to help us questions our digital society
It was good to see that digital is not only a material or a tool for artists (think about that flat, pixelated parka of the fashion collective “Das Leben am Haverkamp”, or this video installation featuring a “Pray-O-Meter”), but also becoming a topic of reflection in itself…
Notably, many concepts tried to make “tangible” the internet and the use of our data. That was even the title of one exhibition “Materialising the Internet”, featuring the work of 20 international artists and designers. That included testimonies of people from all over the world (“Life needs the internet” by Jeroen van Loon), a “Get Popular vending machine” (by Dries Depoorter), and even a “Netflix & chill” room you could rent on Airbnb (by ART404 + Tom Galle).
In the Brabant Lab, “The Sensory Living Lab” made real-time 3D-printed data representations, from the noise in the surrounding exhibition space.
In the “Embassy of Intimacy”, a “secret cookie factory” acted as a metaphor of the use of our data online: you give a personal secret, which is “anonymised” by passing through a black box and then put in a fortune cookie, and finally randomly distributed.
A few blocks away, still drawing upon the idea of explaining the internet and its backbones, “The algoritmisch historisch museum” curated by Casper de Jong aimed at putting algorithms in a historical context, in order to create a critical look at today’s algorithms. Unfortunately, it was only in Dutch.
The “Embassy of Data” also sought to “increase awareness about the possibilities and opportunities afforded by data, but also its threats and shortcomings”.
A radius had been delimited around the building: many learnings about the area, gathered from open-source data sets given by the municipality, were presented. You could visualize figures about the wealth, ethnic origins or cultural practices of the inhabitants of the neighborhood, but also the number of CCTV cameras or the location of 4G antennas and “city beacons”.
By the way, Eindhoven’s “city beacons” are emblematic of the debate on data: those digital kiosks are distributed across the city, to provide information and Wi-Fi for passersby, while at the same time gathering data from their smartphones. Most people are not aware of that collection of data. The city promised the information wouldn’t be used commercially.
Thus, contrary to other countries like France where the privacy-watchdog limits the gathering of personal data in public spaces, in the Netherlands, there is no regulation regarding the placement of sensors in the streets.
“Therefore, there are no records of where the sensors are in place, what kind, what they are monitoring, for whom, how the data is stored or for how long — let alone how well the data is protected” explains the curator of the exhibition.
For those who are excluded from the digital revolution, Gyalpo Batstra, a student from the Design Academy of Eindhoven has the solution: an “Offline Website” designed to meet people in your neighborhood, by acting as a physical Facebook.
This particular topic of digital exclusion was also tackled by “White Spots”, a collaborative multimedia project by Studio Richard Vijgen, mixing maps, videos and VR to explore the global divide between the connected and the non-connected world.
