Paula Chang

Photo by Pete Fung

Initiated by Design Academy Eindhoven’s Community Organiser, Pete Fung, the Experiment Grant marks its first anniversary this month (January 2024). Throughout the year, the micro-grant scheme received 38 applications and seeded its support in 23 projects in the extra-curricular initiatives within the Academy. Under the educational context and community building, the only criteria is that - the students set up their criteria. 

Strengthen connection

Glasses clicking, campfire in the far corner, people sitting on chairs made of scrapped wood, laughters bursting from here and there - a typical scene of an Academy gathering in someone’s backyard.

Don Bosco Universe hosted a design market and an immersive exhibition, both in their garage, attracting 350 visitors during Dutch Design Week 2023. Another design market was M(ART), taking place at the heart of Eindhoven, Residency For The People, sold works designed and made by students of the Academy. 

Participants experimented with recipes together while the other group chopped down vegetables from the local farmers; in the meantime, you heard the pot next to you bubbling the freshly made sauce. The TUTTI Community Cooking Series was a monthly gathering for students, tutors, and staff to get their hands dirty, sit down together by the long table, and share meals with ideas, future projects, and the mundane without judgement.

Drag King was a workshop with 14 participants learning the work of drag, and most importantly, dragging as king. Lucian guided them on how to move the body, how to do the makeup, and so on. The workshop ended with a catwalk and portraits to share and document the final moment of celebration and confirmation. 

The Suit Jacket Cup by Fynnandmathis (Fynn Herlinghaus and Mathis Hadji) was a fashion show intended to return fashion to the people as an individual and cultural phenomenon, instead of being hijacked by industry-ruled business. More than 40 students, along with tutors, travelled to Amsterdam and participated in the realisation of the project with their creative outfits.

Mnemotope was a magazine initiated by Réiltín O'Hagan and Lilou Angelrath which collected students’ musings in writing, visual works, music, and even recipes. In the name of offering a space of exchange and recognition, the launch and reading event extended a warm welcome to the newcomers to the Academy. 

Kai Rasmussen, a certified yoga teacher, hosted the weekly class - Yoga for Designers on the 5th floor of the Academy. It allowed the students to unwind themselves from the bustling curriculum. From the body’s outside to the inside, Let’s get claymotional! was a workshop that nurtured the feelings. Aleksandra Alehina encouraged the participants to express their emotions with clay figures, instead of words. 

Engaging with others 

Design students tend to move around in packs. The following projects burst the bubble and initiated engagement with other terrains by various means - making design accessible. 

Design Roundtable was a series of workshop events that brought designers from different disciplines together. Dan Eames, an in-betweener of school and work, started the event with a tour of the Academy and later on to a gathering of interaction between UX designers, Academy students, and other Netherlands-based designers. It was a navigation among human-centred designers and critical designers on design thinking. Future collaboration awaits. In the same thread, the Grant also supported Dan’s finding on a common ground of diagrammatic design language. 

DAE vs Eindje brought people closer through music. Standing at the crossroads of the blooming Dutch music scene and the powerful community of the Academy, Rosalie Braamkolk invited musicians from different cities of the Netherlands together and introduced the two groups to each other.

Conversations on Pleasure was Johanna Denecke’s graduation project on the influences of patriarchal implications and sex-positive feminist discourse on female sexual pleasure. The conversational safe space provided an intimate room for sharing experiences, questions, insecurities, and individual knowledge - for, by, with women.

‘Write your project description as if it was for your grandmother to understand.’ That was the core of the alternative graduation catalogue Dear Grandma, by Macarius Eng Chern Yu and Camille Pelissou. During the Graduation Show, all 69 copies were sold out with more reserved. The need for a more universal design language is mounting.

Tackling social urgencies  

Designers are rolling up their sleeves and offering solutions and awareness with their design thinking methods, to the more and more complicated contemporary world. 

The Spring Block Party by Adéle Visser and Noam Hasak-Lowy welcomed the new and old comers of the Academy with sliced apples and peanut butter; but most attractively, it was the shelter installation set up for the unhoused first-year students. 

In response to the increasing housing crisis, Rosa Hanssen and Lara van der Poel created the interactive theatre show DOLLHOUSE with 50 audiences, played in Paradiso, Amsterdam. The piece drew attention to matters that were usually taken for granted and questioned the personal relationship with unfamiliar texts. 

ND//Work*Shop by Valentine Langlais and Daisy Dawson created a space around neurodivergency, aiming at designing accessible products and services while questioning values in the process. By using design as a tool, they translated collaboration into showing support and celebrating differences. 

Reality Photoshop (by Gabriel Pendov) Season 3 landed on ‘Age Of Mitigate’, featuring 15 looks of 100% upcycled materials with the concept of illustrating alternative reality on sustainable fashion, upcycling, interactivity and open-mindedness. The show brought people together to celebrate those values and facilitated a community of like-minded individuals.  

Similarly, Summer Memories fashion show, presented by Fynnandmathis, invited the audience to reflect on consumption and encouraged self-exploration through styling and dressing. 

‘A play in a play in a play.’ - a satire on the politics in the world today. Directed by Tanguy Pitavy, The Butcher is a play, actors rehearsing for the play, and people performing these actors in communal events.

Exploring design formats 

With the expansion of design practices, the following projects investigate the possibilities of design formats. 

Geo.frames was a moving image symposium initiated by the GEO-Design department. As one of the first steps to further establish a framework for a moving image practice in the Academy, the symposium incorporated the wish for trans-department exchange evolving around the medium of film.

Going outside of the Academy, Melted Film Festival, organised by Agatha Prieto Jeanty, Klara Branting Paulsell, Meryem Akbaba, and Jonah Attalla, took place in a local cinema, providing the platform for projects with the need for cinema format. The screens were followed by moderated dialogue-based panels.

At the local gallery Onomatopee, the Cut-Out Body, introduced by Parentesi Cinema (Vincenzo Lapiccirella), presented a curated selection of video essays, experimental films, and moving images. It explored the body’s materiality, details, textures, cultural meanings, and trauma. 

Recognising the revival of fermentation, Monja Simon set up the Fermentors as a growing network of microbial and human bodies’ nurturing relationship.  The workshop emphasised the importance of reactivating and preserving situated material practices. 

The Meme Bootcamps was a 3-session workshop hosted by Daniel Holler and Elena Zaghis on meme-making as a form of therapy. They inspired students to harness the power of memes to process their worst, cringiest, and anxiety-inducing moments as designers and artists. Following the discomfort, Cringe or Cool? was an exhibition curated by the design studio DogtoothTM (Anton Ripon and Tony Li) exploring ‘cringe’ as an influential phenomenon in the contemporary societal panorama. The exhibition was a cool voyage of cringe-influenced objects.

All in all

This micro-grant scheme supported student-led activities and events that worked to connect people, facilitate discourse, as well as foster collaboration and experimentation, but it did more. The consensus among all projects surrounded ‘care’. Care for the environment, care for the peers, care for the self, care for the needed, and more.