Marking its 26th edition, Dutch Design Week recently convened over 2,500 designers in Eindhoven, ranging from internationally established names to emerging talents, alongside creative collaborations with major global brands. This year’s overarching theme, Rebel Authentic Worth—or R.A.W.—was established to highlight the social, cultural, and economic value of design that actively creates space for open experimentation, material research, and radical imagination.
The theme placed a particular, timely emphasis on the unpolished and experimental at a moment when artificial intelligence and rapid technological advancements increasingly prioritize automation, optimization, and frictionless visual perfection. It also reflected a growing sense of societal uncertainty regarding technological progress, exploring how contemporary design might challenge these prevailing developments, offer alternative perspectives, or assist humanity in navigating an increasingly complex world. From critical institutional critiques to tactile explorations of natural and recycled materials, 11 projects stood out as defining moments of Dutch Design Week 2026.
1. Design Academy Eindhoven
The annual Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) Graduation Show offered a comprehensive and wide-ranging look at the next generation of creative talent, featuring projects that spanned physical objects, immersive installations, and intensive experimental research. Themes explored by the graduates ran a vast gamut, investigating how systemic change can bring about both positive gains and unintended consequences. Tradition, for instance, can sustain a vital sense of belonging while simultaneously carrying complex colonial or nationalist histories, while emerging professional landscapes create entirely new possibilities without necessarily guaranteeing financial stability or a sustainable livelihood.
"This year’s graduation projects can be read as maps of how graduates have navigated contradictions and established their bearings: what to attend to, what to carry forward, what to stand for and which relationships might sustain their work," noted Nadine Botha, head of the Social Design Master’s program at DAE.
The exhibition’s critical examination of institutional systems proved especially poignant given recent developments at the school. Graduating DAE students recently staged protests over campus conditions, citing inadequate studio space and limited physical facilities necessary for fabricating their ambitious work.
2. Fairspace — Studio Shruthi Venkat — Sagitta Creatives: Blind Spots
Large-scale public installations allow festival visitors to encounter and interact directly with design as they move through the urban landscape of Eindhoven. One prominent example, titled Blind Spots, addressed a foundational question: "Who is safety built for?"
Created through a collaborative effort by Fairspace, Shruthi Venkat, and Sagitta Creatives, the installation utilized familiar symbols of modern security—including surveillance cameras, digital screens, and industrial construction netting—to interrogate the intricate relationship between protection, surveillance, and control. Participants were invited to wander through overlapping layers of physical mesh that deliberately obscured sightlines, while recorded voices played ambiently, offering diverse perspectives on what it genuinely means to feel safe in a shared environment.
Visitors were also encouraged to write down their personal experiences with safety and tie them directly onto the nets for fellow attendees to read. As these contributions accumulated over the course of the week, the installation gradually evolved into a powerful collective record demonstrating how differently individuals experience safety in public spaces.
3. Ori Orisun Merhav: Woven Landscapes
In Woven Landscapes, artist and material researcher Ori Orisun Merhav presented what she termed a direct dialogue between humans, the land, and other-than-human life. The installation featured striking sculptural forms combining woven palm fibers and insect-produced natural resin, exploring how materials shaped and secreted by living organisms might fundamentally influence the ways objects are conceived, designed, and manufactured.
Merhav serves as the founder of Made by Insects, an ongoing research practice dedicated to investigating lac—a natural resin secreted by specific insects—and evaluating its viability as a sustainable material for contemporary design.
"The main practice of the studio is research," Merhav explained. "The sculptures are the leftovers, segments of the time and journey of our research." Through meticulous processes of weaving, binding, and coating, the resulting vessels successfully bridged traditional craft techniques with complex biological processes, suggesting a much more collaborative relationship between human-made objects and the natural world.
4. Yinka Ilori x Brabantia: There Is Magic in Joy
Yinka Ilori is a British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist and designer whose expansive practice spans architecture, sculpture, furniture, and interior and graphic design. Widely celebrated for his exuberant and fearless use of color and pattern, he brought that exact philosophy to everyday household objects through a high-profile collaboration with Dutch housewares brand Brabantia.
For the limited-edition collection titled There Is Magic in Joy, Ilori sought to make daily household chores more pleasurable by transforming practical items—including ironing board covers and waste bins—into vibrant, playful design objects. The color palette relied on sherbet-like orange, lemon yellow, and raspberry, punctuated by bold aqua accents and graphic patterns that infused otherwise mundane products with unexpected personality and warmth.
"At the heart of my work is a belief that art and design should be accessible to all, with projects that bring communities together and create a positive social impact," Ilori stated.
5. TAM Industries: House of Lights
Prefabricated housing is frequently associated with rigid, standardized designs, but Eindhoven-based TAM Industries utilized Dutch Design Week to explore how modern 3D printing can offer significantly greater architectural freedom. Their installation, House of Lights, demonstrated how automated construction techniques can accommodate highly expressive, organic forms without abandoning the logistical efficiencies of industrial production.
Printed using recycled plastic via specialized machinery developed in-house by TAM, the structure incorporated color directly into the raw material itself, completely eliminating the need for exterior paint. Integrated lighting illuminated the printed facade after dark, radically transforming the visual appearance of the house depending on the time of day.
The project also addressed the circular economy, exploring the potential for reusing its constituent materials at the end of the structure’s lifecycle. Rather than treating industrial automation as a constraint on human creativity, TAM views the technology as an enabler for more varied and sustainable architectural designs.
6. Rive Roshan: Beacons of Hope
The pervasive sentiment that contemporary society is navigating an era of profound uncertainty—and the question of how design can provide vital spaces for reflection and reassurance—was a central theme across the festival. Beacons of Hope, conceived by Amsterdam-based design duo Rive Roshan (Ruben de la Rive Box and Golnar Roshan), responded directly to this climate with an immersive installation that combined textured glass, highly reflective surfaces, and kinetic light.
The duo treats light as a primary physical material, utilizing glass and metal surfaces to deliberately shape its movement and create shifting, ethereal patterns of reflection throughout the space. The installation was carefully calibrated to offer visitors a brief, much-needed moment of pause, human connection, and optimism.
"We believe design has a responsibility to foster connection and offer sanctuary," the designers noted. "By choreographing kinetic light, we tap into something universal and deeply emotional, offering a counter-narrative to the heaviness of the daily news cycle and the weight on our emotional well-being."
7. Gijs Schalkx: Onderweg naar een toekomst [On the Way to a Future]
"Ever since I can remember, I have been curious about how things work," said artist Gijs Schalkx. That enduring curiosity has driven him to construct an unconventional fleet of experimental vehicles, including a motorcycle powered by raw swamp gas, an automobile running on waste plastic, and a functional electric flying bicycle.
Presented collectively under the title Onderweg naar een toekomst (On the Way to a Future), these operational vehicles openly challenge societal assumptions regarding efficiency, industrial progress, and sustainability. "Technology is often presented as infallible, fast and efficient. I feel that most people take it in as passive consumers, without any awareness of the processes and infrastructures behind it," he explained.
Rather than dismissing modern technology entirely, Schalkx utilizes his unusual inventions to expose the hidden systems and finite resources that power everyday life. "I try not to reject it, but to rearrange it," he said. "The vehicles really work, but they fall just outside the logic of usefulness. They show our dependence on technology and infrastructure in our daily lives while also showing possibilities we have not yet imagined."
8. The DIRT: The Ashtray, the Cupboard, and the Leather Boots
Why do certain manufactured objects become completely irreplaceable to us, even when they possess little to no monetary value? The DIRT’s exhibition, The Ashtray, the Cupboard, and the Leather Boots, emerged from intimate conversations with three women concerning the enduring memories tied to their favorite possessions—ordinary household items transformed by personal histories into deeply treasured keepsakes. The Dutch Institute of Royal Taste, known as The DIRT, was founded by creative duo Florine van Rees and Jeroen Dijkstra, who specialize in curated exhibitions and narrative scenography.
"We form deep attachments to things and come to treasure them, often for reasons that have little to do with their material, value, or purpose," the designers observed. At a time when consumer culture overwhelmingly encourages products to be discarded and replaced, the exhibition questioned what truly makes certain objects worth keeping.
Recordings of the original conversations accompanied the physical installation, inviting festival visitors to listen directly to the voices behind the selected objects. Three distinct designers then interpreted those narrative stories through brand-new works exploring the complex relationship between everyday items, memory, and personal identity.
In Ritual Remains, Stina Henriksson explored the private rituals associated with fire, drawing conceptual connections between lighting a cigarette and striking a match for a candle. Both acts evoke gathering, celebration, or quiet contemplation while leaving tangible physical traces of what has been consumed.
Lotte Raida’s Slaapzak Kast (Sleeping Bag Cupboard) drew inspiration from childhood memories of camping holidays, reimagining a familiar piece of functional storage furniture through the tactile form of a sleeping bag. The piece investigated how furniture can carry personal associations far beyond its practical utility.
Meanwhile, Astrid Vagner’s Make Me Fit examined the complex relationship between footwear, femininity, and the societal expectations placed on women’s bodies. "Growing up with body parts that didn’t fit into anything girly, particularly reflected in the limited selection of feminine shoes. I started to patch myself up in feminine attributes," Vagner explained, using the familiar form of the leather boot to question how clothing and accessories shape our understanding of identity and belonging.
9. The Swedish School of Textiles: Exit26
Students from the Swedish School of Textiles pushed far beyond conventional definitions of fabric with Exit26, an expansive exhibition exploring the intersections of craft, technology, color, and advanced materiality. The works blurred traditional boundaries separating textiles, sculpture, and wearable design, challenging historical distinctions between the physical and the digital, the sensual and the practical.
Standout works included Viola Schmidt’s The Jeweld Hand, which featured delicate threads trailing outward from an elbow-length suede glove, effectively obscuring the line between a personal accessory and a standalone textile sculpture. Alongside it, Phlox van Oppen’s Weaving Life Stories of Resilient Women utilized multilayered jacquard weaving techniques to examine women’s lived experiences of resilience and personal transformation.
"My work is rooted in an ongoing fascination with how textiles can carry memory, biography, and transformation," van Oppen remarked.
10. Atelier Arunika: Picche Chest of Drawers
Featuring rounded, pill-shaped drawers and playfully exaggerated proportions, the Picche chest of drawers injects an unexpected sense of personality into a traditional furniture typology. Handmade in India, the piece by Arunika Sarkar of Atelier Arunika draws direct inspiration from Postmodern design movements and the meticulously composed visual worlds characteristic of filmmaker Wes Anderson.
"At a time when design is increasingly shaped by efficiency and standardization, Picche explores the value of individuality, play and emotional connection," Sarkar said.
Challenging the entrenched notion that functional objects must remain purely utilitarian, the piece successfully balances sculptural expression with practical storage. "I’m interested in creating furniture that feels almost like a character—an object with its own personality, presence and story, rather than simply something that occupies a space," she added.
11. Impakt – Centre for Media Culture: Code 2026: Terms of Intimacy
As digital technologies become ever more deeply integrated into our private lives, the boundaries separating personal connection, digital convenience, and corporate surveillance are growing increasingly difficult to define. Code 2026: Terms of Intimacy, presented by the Impakt – Centre for Media Culture, explored these contemporary tensions through seven distinct works examining how digital technology routinely collects and capitalizes on our voices, attention, and biological data.
The exhibition addressed subjects ranging from biometric consent to the rise of artificial intelligence companionship, questioning precisely who controls the sensitive information individuals share with increasingly personalized technologies. As part of the sixth edition of Code—an international program bringing together artists, researchers, and policymakers—the exhibition successfully translated abstract concerns regarding privacy and human autonomy into physical, interactive experiences.
Together, the featured works prompted visitors to consider whether technologies designed to promise greater intimacy and connection might also be quietly reshaping the very people who rely on them.
