Creating living environments for inhabitants, patients, or visitors requires “careful design,” which notes that interaction, movement, and transformation occur during the action rather than solely focusing on the outcome.
Please scroll down for the programme of our Dialogues: Living Environments
The Living Environment is made up of the spaces humans and non-humans create, use and move through daily: shared, perceived differently by everyone, and not ours alone: other living and non-living entities inhabit it too. Designers shape it, with the act of designing being a way of learning. Prototypes reveal what a pleasant environment means and for whom. We connect to "R.A.W." by giving inhabitants a voice, experimenting with textures and senses, and sparking discussion about preferred futures.
Dialogues: The Living Environment: Voices, Textures and Futures
Organised by: Marjolein Derks (WUR), Jodi Sturge (UTwente), Juliette van Haren (TU/E)
Designers help shape the living environment. They do more than create positive experiences: through design, they learn what its inhabitants appreciate, how they behave and how experiences can be aligned with power dynamics and principles of fairness. It is a mutual exchange between designing and learning: designers make the environment more pleasant, and their prototypes reveal what 'pleasant' truly means, and for whom.
During this dialogue session, we will make a tour in the living environment and showcase different design projects in this context. We will explore how inhabitants can be given a voice; how experimenting with textures, senses and configurations teaches us how people perceive their environment; and how design can spark discussion about preferred futures.
Natlab, Monday 19 October 9:45-12:30
- 09:45 Walk-in
- 10:00 Welcome and Intro
- 10:30 Tour around the building, highlighting the individual projects by their creators:
- Mari Bastashevski: Unwhorl
- Bas Kramer: Multifunctionality through Modularity
- Camila Vicent Perez: Cane Culture and Code
- Youp Ferket, Oscar Tomico, Victor Muñoz Sanz, Katharine Legun: Plants & Power
- Pranav Prasun: SenseScape
- Stefanie Aerts: Nature's Trace in Glaze
- Yanqi Wang: Fledgling
- 12:00 Plenary discussion
- 12:30 Network lunch
Participation is free after registration. Register before 12 October!
Designing for a thriving planet means moving beyond business as usual and beyond exclusively human-centred perspectives. Through new materials, relations and imaginaries, design can help cultivate more regenerative ways of living together.
Please scroll down for our Dialogues Programme Thriving Planet in Natlab
What does it mean to design for a thriving planet? As ecological and social crises intensify, design must move beyond business as usual and beyond exclusively human-centred perspectives. The Thriving Planet theme track explores how designers can engage more-than-human relations, rethink materials and technologies, respond to situated challenges, and imagine regenerative futures. Through experimentation, collaboration and care, these projects propose new ways of living with communities, environments and other forms of life.
Dialogues: Thriving Planet
Natlab, Tuesday 20 October 9:45-12:30
- Organised & convened by: Amina Chouairi (WUR), Ana Bóia Cação (TU Eindhoven), Jairo da Costa Junior (UTwente), Rebekka Groeneveld (TU Delft)
What makes for a thriving planet? This Dialogue session brings together ten confirmed projects grappling with more-than-human relations, materials, and situated environmental challenges, spanning TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, University of Twente and Wageningen University.
The morning opens with a collective reflection on each team's design process: what was hardest, how it was overcome, and what it taught about design. Parallel workshops follow. Waste to Infrastructure presents its work on sanitation and plastic waste before running a hands-on workshop in which participants build a wall from waste materials. Microbial Smellscapes combines a presentation, video and informal exhibition on sensing future water environments. S.P.H.E.R.E presents its work on redesigning food systems for extreme scarcity. Further projects, including Arthropolis, Kombuchán, FUNKI, Cultural Heritage Climate Futures, Biochar Kiln Design and Self-healing Futures, join the reflection and exhibition. The day closes with a network lunch.
- 09:45-10:00 Walk-in
- 10:00-10:15 Introduction
- 10:15-11:00 Collective Reflections on Design Processes
- 11:00-11:15 Break
- 11:15-12:30 Parallel Workshops
- 12:30 Network lunch
Participation is free after registration. Register before 13 October.
Between Utopia and Dystopia lies a realm of possibilities, a space that is designed. Digital Futures takes you on a journey towards what’s possible, if we dare.
Scroll down for our Dialogues Programme Digital Futures
Utopian visions of digital futures have AI curing disease. Dystopian ones have it building the next bioweapon. Both arrive as prophecy: a single future, already decided, nobody's hand on the wheel. Digital Futures explores the space between: futures are designed, not forecast. Nine projects stake out that ground, from an AI whose values you write yourself to parrots choosing sounds in their own cage. Bridges get built by people who choose where they go.
Dialogues: Digital Futures - Nothing is Inevitable
Designing the Space between Utopia and Distopia
Natlab, Wednesday 21 October 9:45-12:30
Organised by: Tilman Dingler (TU Delft, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering) & Tuan (Ting) Huang (Eindhoven University of Technology, Industrial Design)
When AI comes up, the conversation splits in two: the future where it cures disease, and the future where it takes everything from us. Both arrive as prophecy, and a prophecy leaves you nothing to do but wait. This session is about the ground in between, which does not merely arrive: it gets designed, and it could be designed here. Nine designers each put one provocation on the table: three minutes, one slide. You will spend half an hour with the prototypes behind them. Then you pick an argument and have it, at a table, with the designer present, and at some point you will be asked to argue the side you do not hold. We are not after consensus. We are after positions clear enough to disagree with, and the thing each would oblige us to build. What the room produces may go into the Design United e-Magazine.
- 09:45 — walk in
- 10:00 — welcome and framing : Two prophecies, neither of them designable; today is about the space between.
- 10:10 Part 1
- provocation round with all project pitches (see above)
- demo carousel of all projects
- 11:05 break and re-seat
- 11:15 Part 2
- design debate
- 12:00 Part 3
- taking positions
- 12:25 — Closing question: what would we have to design to move this one step?
- 12:30 — network lunch
Participation is free after registration .
Register before 14 October!
Please scroll down for our Design Research Programme Health & Wellbeing in Natlab
Health belongs to no single field. Doctors, engineers, designers and the people living with a condition each hold a fragment, and every turn in this kaleidoscope reveals a different pattern. How can design bring these ways of knowing closer together? Join us in exploring the many meanings of health, from tools made for the clinic to ideas about technologies still to come, and in discovering what they share once they are placed side by side.
Dialogues: Building Bridges in Design for Health
Natlab, Thursday 22 October, 9:45-12:30
Organised by: Carmen Heuvelmans (UT), Marthe Derkzen (WUR), Karin Bogdanova (TUD)
Everyone who designs for health and well-being starts from their own understanding of what these concepts mean and what needs feel most urgent. A researcher measuring a condition and an artist helping someone live alongside it may both be working on health, yet they rarely have the opportunity to explain their approaches to one another.
The projects gathered in this Dialogues session approach the theme from many different perspectives, and what connects them is not always immediately visible. This session takes that as its starting point. It invites participants to look for connections that are not given in advance, and to explore how much those connections can hold.
Whatever your background, you are invited to help identify where connections can be made—and, together, to build the bridges over the course of the morning.
09:45 Welcome and introduction to the dialogue session, theme and structure
09:50 Project pitches
- Short pitches by the project owners:
- Anish Mohite: DCPA Care Scan and Timo Maessen : OverDeTop
- Melody Syu: Learn like a Coach and Marcos Montero Grande: Here Now 2076: Choose your free Ai mental health support
- Daan Robben: Moefy and Catharina Maria van Riet: Democratising Assistive Wearables
Part 1: Choosing the Crossing
- Project owners present the first connections they discovered between the projects
- Collective mapping of connections between the projects
11:11 Break (we like creative numbers) 💜
11:30 Part 2: Activities with project owners
12:00 Part 3: Raising the Arch
- Group dialogues that build up each bridge brick by brick, in two rounds
- Collective reflection
12:25 Wrap up and
12:30 Network lunch
Participation is free after registration. Register before15 October!
Who counts? In a time of growing polarisation we build bridges to overlooked realities in design. We question who has been left out on the basis of their ability, race, gender or sexuality, and explore how the voice and agency of the more-than-human world can be included in design.
Scroll down for our Dialogues Programme in Natlab
In a time of growing polarisation, Building Bridges at Dutch Design Week reflects on two principles of the politics of design: inclusion and representation. The selected projects expose overlooked realities and question who has been left out of the category of the fully human, on the basis of ability, race, gender or sexuality. Others turn outward, exploring the voice and agency of the more-than-human world. Come reflect, question, and join the dialogue across our divides.
Dialogues: Equal Society & Politics of Design: Designing inclusion: Who Counts?
Natlab, Friday 23 October 9:45-12:30
Organised by: Wilbert Tabone (TU Delft), Sharvari Bondre (TU Eindhoven, Bas Meester (WUR)
In this dialogue session we explore firstly some examples of design that aim to make societies more equal by focussing on design for a specific group that has been overlooked in society. In the second part we engage in dialogue with projects that try to redefine the politics of design by questioning how we design, who we include and what is possible when we make politically informed choices in design.
- 09:45 walk in
- 10:00: Introduction to the dialogue session, theme, and structure.
- 10:15: Part 1: Equal Society
- Presentations by project owners of: BróGAA, Rhoē: A Lived-Experience-Informed Redesign of Period Pads, and A Spatial-Acoustic Interface for Non-Visual Book Discovery: Experiential Equity in Digital Libraries.
- Panel with project owners.
- 11:00: Coffee Break and Expo
- 11:30: Part 2: Politics of Design
- Presentations by project owners of: Sea(t) at the table, Philosophy & Design Probes in a Cabinet*, and Rapport Redefined: Using Philosophy-through-Design to better understand neuro-inclusive social interactions.
- Panel with project owners.
- 12:15: Reflections and Wrap-up.
- 12:30: Network lunch
Participation is free after registration. Register before17 October!
*
Philosophy & Design Probes in a Cabinet
Natlab, Friday 23 October 13:30 - 15:30
Organised by: Annemiek van Boeijen, Samuel Franklin, Nolen Gertz, Michael Nagenborg, Doenja Oogjes, Değer Özkaramanlı, Virginia Tassinari, Ron Wakkary.
As an encore, the designers and philosophers of Philosophy & Design Probes in a Cabinet are hosting an additional session – and you’re invited to join! In this session, you will engage in a conversation fueled by ‘Probes’*, and questions that these probes raise.
This dialogue will unfold as a polylogue around the probes, displayed at the centre like a Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities). Each probe, created by designers and philosophers, carries a tag with a name and a starting question. These probes will serve as prompts for a conversation that explores questions connected to the work of philosophers. The eight designers and philosophers will initiate the polylogue, while other participants are invited to either listen in or join the conversation.
Registration is not required.
*The Probes were developed as a 4TU collaboration project, funded by 4TU.federation/Design United