Dutch Design Week’s 26th edition presented work by more than 2,500 designers, from established practitioners to emerging talent, alongside collaborations with major brands. Its theme, Rebel Authentic Worth (R.A.W.), focused on design’s social, cultural and economic value, with an emphasis on experimentation, material research and radical imagination.
The program highlighted unpolished and experimental approaches at a time when technology and AI increasingly favor optimization and visual perfection. Several projects also considered uncertainty around technological progress and how design might offer alternative perspectives. Here are 11 projects that stood out.
Design Academy Eindhoven’s annual Graduation Show brought together objects, installations and research by graduating designers. Its projects examined contradictions, from the ways traditions can create belonging while carrying colonial or nationalist histories to the possibilities—and economic uncertainty—associated with emerging professions. The exhibition also addressed institutional systems, as students had recently protested what they described as inadequate studio space and limited facilities.
Blind Spots, a public installation by Fairspace, Studio Shruthi Venkat and Sagitta Creatives, asked who public safety is designed to serve. Using surveillance cameras, screens and construction netting, it explored the overlap between protection, surveillance and control. Visitors moved through layers of mesh, listened to recorded perspectives and could attach accounts of their own experiences to the nets, creating a growing record of different understandings of safety.
In Woven Landscapes, artist and material researcher Ori Orisun Merhav combined woven palm fibers with resin produced by insects. The sculptural forms considered how materials shaped by living organisms could influence design. Merhav, who founded the research practice Made by Insects, investigates lac, a natural resin secreted by certain insects. The resulting vessels bring weaving and binding techniques into conversation with biological processes.
British-Nigerian artist and designer Yinka Ilori collaborated with Dutch housewares brand Brabantia on There Is Magic in Joy, a limited-edition collection intended to make everyday chores more pleasurable. The range applies Ilori’s vivid colors and graphic patterns to practical items including ironing board covers and waste bins.
Eindhoven-based TAM Industries used its House of Lights installation to demonstrate how 3D printing could bring more expressive forms to prefabricated architecture. The structure was printed from recycled plastic using the company’s machines, with color incorporated into the material rather than applied as paint. Integrated lighting changed the appearance of its facade after dark. The project also considered how the materials could be reused when the structure is no longer needed.
Rive Roshan’s Beacons of Hope used glass, metal and moving light to create shifting reflections. The Amsterdam-based design duo conceived the installation as a place for visitors to pause and find connection and reassurance amid uncertainty.
Artist Gijs Schalkx presented Onderweg naar een toekomst (On the Way to a Future), a collection of functioning vehicles that includes a motorcycle powered by swamp gas, a car that runs on waste plastic and an electric flying bicycle. The unconventional machines question familiar ideas about efficiency, progress and sustainability. Schalkx said the vehicles are intended to reveal the systems and infrastructure behind technology, rather than reject it.
The DIRT’s The Ashtray, the Cupboard, and the Leather Boots explored why ordinary possessions can become treasured through personal memories. The exhibition grew from conversations with three women about meaningful objects, with recordings of those conversations accompanying new works by designers Stina Henriksson, Lotte Raida and Astrid Vagner. Their pieces considered the ties between objects, memory and identity, including rituals around fire, recollections of camping and expectations surrounding women’s bodies and footwear.
Students from the Swedish School of Textiles presented Exit26, an exhibition that pushed beyond conventional definitions of fabric. The works connected craft, technology, color and materiality, crossing between textiles, sculpture and wearable design. Among them, Viola Schmidt’s The Jeweld Hand featured threads extending from a long suede glove, while Phlox van Oppen’s Weaving Life Stories of Resilient Women used multilayered jacquard weaving to examine resilience and transformation.
Atelier Arunika’s Picche chest of drawers, designed by Arunika Sarkar and handmade in India, reimagined storage furniture with rounded, pill-shaped drawers and playful proportions. Drawing on Postmodern design and the visual world of filmmaker Wes Anderson, the piece treats a functional object as something with its own character and presence.
Finally, Impakt – Centre for Media Culture presented Code 2026: Terms of Intimacy, an exhibition of seven works about the ways digital technologies collect and use voices, attention and bodily data. Topics included biometric consent and AI companionship. The exhibition turned questions about privacy and autonomy into physical, interactive experiences, asking how technologies that promise intimacy and connection might also shape their users.
Sources: Design Milk.