Obviously defining a "Best of" Dutch Design Week, or indeed any design week, is impossible, one can only hope to attempt to collate your personal highlights and thus provide an impression of how you experienced the event: which is exactly what DAD Galerie Berlin are currently doing with a presentation of some their highlights.
Our highlight of their highlights is without question the new hanging lamp by Floris Wubben. When we spoke to Floris at his solo Low Tech Crafts exhibition at DAD Galerie earlier this year he told us that having recently been referred to as a "ceramic designer" it was probably time to find a new material. It is therefore only logical that his new lamps are ceramic. There is a delicious inevitability about the fact. Utilising the analogue process he developed for his Pressed Vase collection Floris creates his lamps by squeezing clay à la Play-Doh through a template, the result is a series of unique lampshades which hang like a Brugmansia or similar trumpet flower frozen in perpetuity, and which are the most delicate yet commanding, self-confident objects; and currently a work in progress. The final project is due to be released in early 2016. Or Milan as its more commonly referred to in design circles.
In addition to Floris Wubben's lamps we were very take with Doreen Westphal's FungiFuturi project. Essentially a box of mushrooms. Although appearances can be deceptive.
The number of projects in which designers concern themselves with food is currently growing exponentially, and with a parallel exponential absurdity. We really don't understand why you'd want to 3D print chocolate, unless you're in marketing and want to create merchandise. Designers should be thinking of ways to improve the fairness of food distribution and reducing the environmental impact of food production. Not how to 3D print chocolate.
Doreen Westphal hasn't really designed anything. That mushrooms grow on used coffee grounds isn't a new discovery, as any student can confirm from experience. However much like Marlene Klausner's Depot_0411 project from Vienna Design Week 2013 what Doreen Westphal has done is demonstrated how easily and simply one can produce mushrooms in a contemporary urban environment and therefore how easily and simply we can revolutionise global food production, global food consumption and our relationship to both. If only we'd try. Collecting used coffee grounds from Eindhoven cafes and restaurants Doreen grows the mushrooms in the cellar of a disused building in Eindhoven. Analogue, reproducible, sustainable and tasty. For us the box of mushroom substrate the FungiFuturi project markets and which allows us all to grow and harvest mushrooms at home is a very neat demonstration of how simple the system is. A basis for discussion and debate. And a very neatly packaged product. The real value of the project however comes through organised, large scale, civic, municipal projects. Who needs 3D printed food? Honestly? Who?
In addition DAD Galerie are presenting a new collection of plaids created by Hella Jongerius in cooperation with various young designers for the Tilburg Textile Museum, a series of very small vases by Quinda Verheul, one very large vase by Maarten Baas and the RVR chair by Dirk Vander Kooij, not a new object but very much like Joy Division's "Love will tear us a part" not something you can conceivably ever tire of. What DAD Galerie aren't showing is Daphna Laurens' new glassware collection for the Nationaal Glasmuseum Leerdam, or at least not yet, it is however on its way.
Obviously defining a "Best of" Dutch Design Week is impossible, we do however very much like what DAD Galerie have collated. All are invited to judge for themselves at DAD Galerie Berlin, Oranienburger Str. 32 (Heckmann Höfen), 10117 Berlin
A few impressions:
