Dutch Design Week has once again demonstrated its reputation for presenting the most innovative and original student design work from around the globe. This year's event featured an extraordinary array of avant-garde projects, including weaponized brooms, a swinging oven installation, and a device capable of detecting Chinese censorship signals. Students from more than 30 design schools across the Netherlands, along with several European institutions, converged on Eindhoven in October to showcase their boundary-pushing creations.
Among the standout projects was "Tenderlymilitant.exe" by Anna Zoe Hamm from Design Academy Eindhoven, a bachelor's thesis project that transforms the concept of weapons through four broomstick-weapon hybrids. Hamm's work represents both a study in material culture and a deconstruction of violence itself, incorporating the broom's historical connections to female labor, witch symbolism, and martial arts into sculptural form. The project proposes that care and nurture can exert forces as powerful as violence, drawing inspiration from plants' quiet defense systems. Hamm describes her creation as "a weapon armory for the queer-feminist counter apocalypse" and has developed choreography based on her martial arts training to "activate" the objects. The work was displayed at both the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate exhibition and the "Basic Instinct: Making-With" exhibition at Kazerne.
Gijs Hennen from Academie Minerva created another mesmerizing installation with his "Roto P1" project, featuring a household oven suspended as a pendulum that swings through the air while demonstrating rotational molding processes. The oven contains a rotating mold that produces the Roto P1 lamp, a fully realized product available for purchase. Hennen specializes in large-scale, machine-based installations that demystify industrial and factory processes. His second project, "Meat Machine," presented a visceral representation of industrial animal slaughter and earned him a nomination for a Young Talent Award at the Manifestations exhibition.
The "Back to the Flax" collective, comprising 10 students from Design Academy Eindhoven, has undertaken a multi-year project to revive flax cultivation on an agricultural plot outside the city. Their work focuses on regenerative design and community building through the restoration of lost knowledge and production processes. The ultra-renewable flax plant was historically widespread in the region, and the students' installation addresses the challenges of processing locally grown flax. Their displayed works featured hairy, totemic forms with unprocessed or partially processed flax, creating particularly striking pendant lighting that resembles onion bulbs topped with brushy buds.
Luca Ortmann from Berlin University of the Arts addressed the often-overlooked sadness of temporary bus stops with his "Waiting for the Bus" project. Recognizing that these locations are typically nothing more than unsheltered signposts on blank pavement, Ortmann developed a system of deployable street furniture featuring friendly, curving tubular steel structures. His designs are based on places where people naturally like to linger, such as window ledges and bike racks, aiming to bring joy into everyday transit experiences and provide moments for pause and reflection.
Alice Baker from Design Academy Eindhoven presented two stunning glass projects that demonstrate exceptional craftsmanship despite only working in the medium for about a year. "Depicting Dark Waters" features lifelike, meticulously detailed models of deep-sea corals that serve scientific purposes, as these creatures are rarely seen and cannot be brought to the surface. Her work connects to the largely forgotten craft of scientific glass model-making. Her second project, "What We Are," exploded a eukaryotic cell to thousands of times its actual size, creating an illuminated ceiling installation where organelles dance overhead.
The University of Twente's "Freehabilitation" project tackles the challenge of maintaining motivation during repetitive rehabilitation exercises, particularly for stroke recovery patients. Led by assistant professor of interaction design Armağan Karahanoğlu, the team developed implements that facilitate hand rehabilitation at home during everyday tasks. Their innovations include a cup that lights up according to squeeze pressure, an electric toothbrush that keeps twisting to require wrist angle adjustments, and reimagined versions of spatulas and computer mice.
Philipp Remus from Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences stood out in a year when wool was a recurring theme throughout Dutch Design Week. His "Felt the Future" project goes beyond creating two attractive shoe prototypes made entirely from wool to conducting deep research into wool's potential as a sustainable material. Remus aims to open new applications for wool, which in Europe is currently a low-valued, near-waste byproduct of sheep farming for meat and dairy. His research explores wool's biodegradability and the air-purifying potential of abraded wool fibers.
Kai-Hsiang Wen from Design Academy Eindhoven created one of the most engaging installations with "How to Catch the Fire Dragon," featuring dozens of old stereos with antennas extended high into the air. The work addresses the Chinese government's practice of jamming foreign radio broadcasts, especially those from Taiwan, by broadcasting Chinese opera pieces via satellite. This jamming signal is unofficially known as "Firedrake" or the fire dragon due to its sound pattern. Wen's modified radio antenna physically sways in response to incoming jamming signals, functioning as a censorship detector that makes "invisible geopolitical tensions in the airwaves perceptible." The project exemplifies this year's trend of designers exposing hidden power structures behind technologies in both Eastern and Western contexts.
