Dutch Design Week 2017

If in the last week of October, you get into Eindhoven and take a bed at a local hostel, you are twice lucky. It’s time for the annual Dutch Design Week. It means that a city in the south of the Netherlands with a population of 220,000 hosts about 300,000 guests. We don’t know how.

A couple of words that stand for Dutch Design Week are ‘designs of the future’. These guys like free-thinking and don’t like barriers. They provocate, combine and use humour. The last one is a tool for laughing at themselves, but more at conservative surroundings. Look at Maarten Baas’ smoked chairs or Marcel Wanders’ lamps to understand the Dutch.

The first Dutch Design Week began back in 1998. It wasn’t the week, but only a day. Since then The Day of Design has grown, and organizers have a lot to pride. What to expect this year? 2500 designers, more than 300 exhibitions and 420 thematic events from design management to food design.

One of the ambassadors is the Dezeen founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs. It resulted in an experimental project Good Design for a Bad World – a series of panel discussions. They’ll talk about pollution, climate change, refugees, terrorism, politics, and design as problem-solving tools.

The process and craft made the stir in 2016 (the theme of the exhibition sounded as ‘The Making Of’). Dutch Design Week 2017 shows the ‘Stretch’ coming with revolutionary ideas and innovations. The contemporary design resembles yoga for the brain. It’s like stretching exercises for people who don’t want to get stuck and seek the new standard.

We also built our exposition on contrasts. The conceptual project of Ukrainian designers calls ‘Between Tradition and Innovation’. These are things that combine traditional techniques and the latest inventions. For example, our copper lamp ‘Zerno’ was created in the collaboration with nature. We took a form of seed, a well-known material and used our technology of oxidation. As a result, we got a unique colour with gradient transitions from light to dark tones.

The main place where world creators will meet is a temporary pavilion made of recycled materials. Organizers borrowed them from residents and promise to turn them back after the DDW. Such a building shows the future for sustainable architecture and intellectual construction methods. It was constructed without screws or glue, and all the beams will be left intact.