Dutch Design Week 2018: Top five graduation projects

For Dutch Design Week’s 17th year, Design Academy Eindhoven has shaken things up, moving its central graduation show from its usual location at De Witte Dame to a vast former factory space at Campina.

The setting may have changed this year, but the drive and ambition of the projects on show – from new design rituals to social thinking and speculative fiction – remains as strong as ever. Here are five of this year’s stand-out ideas, straight from the factory floor.

 

Water-wise bathing

Facing a future with less access to water, and more pressure not to waste it on high-usage rituals such as baths or showers, Alice Guidi offers a new, tactile wash ritual instead. Linen Bath supplies three linen wash products – a soft cloth, an exfoliating sponge, and a towel – alongside a golden basin, spoon and stool. With water-wise washing this inviting, saving 45 litres of water a day (the amount used on even a five-minute shower) suddenly seems an appealing prospect.

Visualising pregnancy

Most of the information a woman receives about her baby’s progress is via a book or a screen, with little opportunity to fully visualise what is happening inside her body. Inger Marianne Wiering’s proposal adds in access to a realistic projected image of the embryo as it develops, to be experienced in addition to the standard ultrasounds, so that “medical facts become less abstract, and more personal”.

Mix-your-own home scent rituals

Teddy Schuyers has created Scentiment, a beautiful kit for making your own perfumes at home. The distilling process begins with natural ingredients such as orange peel or flowers, and then comes down to mixing combinations according to your mood. Offering a cheaper and more natural alternative to synthetic perfume mixes, the kit is also an opportunity to bring a new mindful making ritual into the home.

Aroma atoms for cooking

Alexandra Genis’s Atoma breaks down the science of flavour into a set of edible molecular compounds that act like a spice collection. Modelled in cocoa butter, each compound can be grated into a meal to add a facet of flavour. Used in combination, they can build to recognisable flavours, such as strawberry, or be experimented with to create something new and bespoke. As each compound is made from an artificial flavour, Atoma also presents a possible way forward for a society that loves flavourful cooking but may no longer be able to justify the resource spent creating every taste naturally.

 

Cake-inspired homewares

Erika Emerén is one of a number of students this year anticipating the ‘return of ornament’. She has adapted the form language of the Spettekaka cake – a Swedish cultural institution – to make a series of ceramics. Pouring a plaster ‘batter’ onto a rotating tube, she makes colourful and characterfully splattered vessels, bringing “a folklore tradition into design”.

WGSN subscribers will be able to access all of our trend and insight reports from Dutch Design Week – including key ideas, home and lifestyle trends, and colour, material and finish directions – shortly after the shows wrap.

Can’t wait until then? Check out the highlights from London Design Festival – another of the design world’s most lifestyle-driven, CMF-rich events – right here.

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