Dutch Design Week

This week was a little different to my usual weeks. During one of the lectures in the first weeks the Dutch Design Week was mentioned. To cut a long story short, Arooj, Jess and I thought it would be an amazing experience to go and have a look at the exhibitions.

All throughout the city of Eindhoven there were different small exhibitions, each with a specific focus. I found it so intriguing to see design being applied to so many different areas. My personal favourite was the exhibition in the Philips Museum. It provided a detailed overview of how Philips has developed as a technology company over the last century, going from a small company from Eindhoven to a multinational company.

What fascinated me the most was seeing how broad the range of products are that Philips produces. Previously, I had simply associated them with products like electric toothbrushes, kitchen gadgets and lighting. During my time there, I realised that one of their main focusses is actually medical care. Even very early on, they were already involved in designing X-ray apparatus and nowadays design products such as MRI scanners and medical tools for less economically developed countries.

One section in the museum displayed their design process, including sketches, storyboards and prototypes. It was quite interesting to see that they seem to go through the exact same design process that we use when we develop new products.

Another very interesting exhibition was based around food. My favourite product was the SCOBY packaging. Their project looked at the same problem as I do: plastic packaging and all the waste that is being created. However, they took a different approach, trying to create food packaging out of bacterial. While it did not look like anything I would want to wrap around my food, I just found it interesting to see the different approaches to the same problem.

It was definitely a nice experience and we all enjoyed our time there. It was bit of a shame that we were only there for one day. All the exhibitions were scattered around the city, so we did not get the chance to see everything that we had wanted. However, all in all it was definitely a nice change to our usual work in the studio!