Design Milk, October 2013

Another highlight of Dutch Design Week was the demonstration Floris Wubben gave me of how his Crown Vase is made. Here’s the post I wrote for Design Milk…
Floris Wubben

I went to Sectie-C to meet Floris Wubben where he had opened his studio up to the public alongside 79 other designers for Dutch Design Week. Floris very kindly gave me a demonstration of how his Crown Vase is made. Launched for Design Week, it’s so new that the first ones were still warm when he put them on the plinth!

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Design Milk, October 2013

This is a round-up post for Design Milk covering my favourite finds from Dutch Design Week 2013 in Eindhoven in my role as Editor at Large…
Dutch Design Week 2013

Eindhoven feels like a city of possibilities. It’s an industrial city, once populated by textile and cigar factories and latterly the Phillips empire—it’s now full of huge empty buildings. This could make it feel like its time has passed, but the creativity, optimism and confidence of this city makes it feel like it’s the brink of its big moment. Dutch Design Week offered incredible diversity – of disciplines, of new versus established designers and of applied versus conceptual work. These are just some of the things that caught my eye.

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Design Milk, October 2013

One of the absolute highlights of my trip to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week was seeing Piet Hein Eek’s space – this is my report for American design blog, Design Milk…

Piet Hein Eek

Visiting Piet Hein Eek’s space was one of the most inspiring parts of my trip to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week. In his final exam, Piet wrote: “If you want to function successfully and design beautiful objects, you need to make sure that your environment is a stimulating one and that you feel like a fish in water.” He said that creating this type of environment, your daily reality, is much more important than setting all kinds of goals for the future.

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We Heart, October 2013

I wrote a series of profile pieces for We Heart on the top graduates at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show as part of Dutch Design Week. This one is about Victoria Ledig and her Precious Skin project…
victoria ledig precious skin

Victoria Ledig is petit, attractive and immaculately presented, from her precarious heels to her perfect black bob. She is the last person you would expect to find in a slaughterhouse. And yet this is where her dedication to her graduate project at Design Academy Eindhoven took her. “It started with a fascination with leather as a material. I did an internship at Ecco, in the design department of a tannery in Dongen in the Netherlands. I started to get a feel for what a fantastic material leather is. You can do so much with it – you can turn it into something that seems almost artificial,” says Victoria. “I realised that the connection with what leather is and where it comes from has been lost, which is a pity in my eyes.”

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Design Milk, October 2013

This is my report for Design Milk from textile manufacturer Vlisco’s HQ in Eindhoven as part of Dutch Design Week 2013…
Vlisco DDW13

You might assume that Vlisco was a West African company selling to the Dutch, but in fact quite the opposite is true. Vlisco have been making traditional batik fabric in Holland since 1846, when Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen founded the company. Because genuine Indonesian batik was very labor-intensive and therefore expensive, he spotted an opportunity to automate the dyeing process to make the fabrics more affordable.

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We Heart, October 2013

I wrote a series of profile pieces for online lifestyle magazine We Heart while in I was Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week. This one is on Bob de Graaf and his Species of Illumination project…
species of illumination

“The movement of living creatures triggers sensations, emotions and communication,” says Bob de Graaf. “In 2011, I made a radio controlled box with an abstract ‘head’ on it, and released it in a park in Eindhoven. I was the invisible puppeteer who controlled an abstract form so that it moved as if it was living. I was amazed by all the different reactions it got. People started waving at it, petting it, chasing it, and speeding up their own movement in reaction to it. It was a big discovery for me: that such a simple thing could provoke such joy and fun in people. As Plato said: “You can discover more in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

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Design Milk, October 2013 (video)

In October I went to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week and collaborated with Daniel Nelson to make a short film for Design Milk about the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show. We got the film live while we were still in Eindhoven making it the first film coverage to come out of Dutch Design Week…
Design Academy Eindhoven

The Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show was definitely one of the highlights of Dutch Design Week. Every year the Keep An Eye Foundation awards four students a grant of €11,000 to continue the work they’ve started at the academy. I spoke to five of the finalists about their work.

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We Heart, October 2013

The Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show was one of the highlights of Dutch Design Week. I wrote a series of profile pieces for online design and lifestyle magazine, We Heart, about some of the top graduates. This is a piece about Martijn van Strein and his project Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear.
dystopian brutalist outer wear

“How we think affects how things are.” So said Ilse Crawford as she explained the different types of work at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show titled Self Unself. Some of the work, whilst certainly fully resolved, remains conceptual in its ambition. One example is Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear by Martijn van Strein, winner of one of four Keep An Eye Foundation grants.

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