Signals

The Netherlands – The 25th edition of Dutch Design Week has kicked off in Eindhoven with this year’s anniversary theme being Past, Present, Possible. The theme is a call to the design industry to keep room for experimentation, a key component of the festival. 

In contrast with last year’s strong focus on Artificial Intelligence and a future of blurred realities, this year, graduates and designers are questioning what it means to be human and how we can create space between ourselves and technology.

The Digital Detoxery by Noortje van Velzen explores the negative effect of social media on young women. Through five artefacts, the designer imagines physical solutions to digital problems, such as a Physical Notification Service and an Attention Span Clinic. University of the Arts Berlin graduate Emma Mende presented Sumo, a pink bean-bag-like sculpture designed for guilt-free rest in a productivity-driven world. The backlash against technology among young people is something we’ve previously covered in Teens, Tech and Tapping Out. 

Of course, it is hard to design for a future while ignoring the impact that AI will have on it. The difference in conversations this year, however, is the shift towards a more collaborative approach when using AI in design: championing the human and the physical while integrating technology into the process. Vera van der Burg’s From Text-to-Clay project questions whether we should approach collaborating with AI like we do with the medium of clay, embracing its unpredictability. The artist ‘uses the deliberate pace of ceramics as a counterpoint to the immediacy of generative AI’, resulting in a ‘slow and reflective AI design practice’. 

MU Hybrid Art House’s exhibition Other Intelligences explores different forms of intelligence that go beyond the human through the work of 12 artists, with themes of co-existence, interconnectedness and empathy. Korean artist Sookyun Yang used AI to imagine wearable robots that draw on the shapes and functions of insects, plants and the human body. They are designed to be worn to expand human perception in the hope that empathy might be the key to encourage the coexistence of humans, nature and technology, a theme we unpack in the Nature’s New Language section of Innovation Debrief 2025–2026.

Another wearable device designed to foster empathy is Echo+ by HTW Berlin University of Applied Sciences student Tung Son Tran. The device translates internal feelings and emotions into visual, acoustic and haptic signals for others to understand how someone may be feeling. 

Stay tuned for more daily coverage of Dutch Design Week 2025.