Dutch Design Week 2013: from synthetic biology to 3D printing, technologies that could signal the future of fashion are demonstrated in garments and accessories at an exhibition in Eindhoven (+ slideshow).
Object 12-1 by Matija Čop
For the Modebelofte 2013 Future Fashions exhibition, Eindhoven fashion store You Are Here and Amsterdam agency Glamcult Studio collaborated to select young fashion designers who have worked with technologists, to create experimental new materials or recycle old ones.
Design by Rianne Suk
“We tried to make it about technology and innovation, as well as handcraft,” curator Ellen Albers of You Are Here told Dezeen.
The range of projects on display was curated to show how different technologies can be applied to fashion design and textiles, plus adapted for other applications.
Designs by Sadie Williams (left), Jef Montes (centre) and Ana Rajcevic
“[The exhibition is] an examination of what these new techniques can do for us, and how can we bring designers and companies together so that they can use the techniques for other kinds of things,” said Albers.
Items on displays are split into two groups, one on each floor of a dilapidated former fire commander’s house.
Design by Jef Montes
The ground floor contains pieces categorised as Revolutionary Innovations, which were created using processes such as 3D printing, laser cutting and moulding techniques.
On the first floor, the Hyper Crafts section displays exaggerated uses of traditional techniques such as pleating, knitting, embroidery and woodworking.
Barkfur, a synthetically-created biomaterial, is used by Danish designer Laerke Hooge Andersen to suggest how we could grow clothing directly onto the body in the future.
Dutch Design Week 2013: Dutch artist Arne Hendriks proposes shrinking the human population to an average height of 50 centimetres as a way to reduce the amount of food and natural resources we consume.
The Incredible Shrinking Man is a speculative project devised by Arne Hendriks in response to the current trend for a taller population, which he claims is no longer “a desired result in an age of increasing scarcity”.
Hendriks, himself almost two metres tall, accepts that the increased height of the global population is the result of better food, medicine, hygiene and living circumstances, but argues that being taller today represents “a burden, on ourselves and on the planet.” He therefore presents a range of conceptual ways to reverse the trend.
“At 50 centimetres we’d only need about 2-5 percent of the resources we need now,” Hendriks points out. “If the 20th century was all about growth, perhaps the 21st century is about downsizing.”
Lactose intolerance celebration in Beijing
His proposals for obtaining the “theoretical goal” of a universal height of 50 centimetres include elixirs that support slower growth and genetic growth experiments with zebrafish. Hendriks also organised a party in Beijing celebrating lactose intolerance, as the inability to digest milk contributes to slower growth.
Despite potential disadvantages, such as a brain size that “wouldn’t be much bigger than a walnut”, Hendriks claims that the height reduction would allow the entire global population to fit in the world’s six largest urban centres, leaving the rest of the planet free for agriculture. Only renewable energy would be needed and “one chicken will feed a hundred”.
The Disproportionate Restaurant
Initiatives undertaken as part of The Incredible Shrinking Man project include investigative workshops, exhibitions and the creation of a Disproportionate Restaurant that serves portions tailored to the 50-centimetre-tall customer of the future.
The project won the Future Concepts category at last week’s Dutch Design Awards, where the selection committee said: “It is performed with so much zest that you can only take the idea seriously.”
It’s been a long established trend that people become taller. As a direct result we need more resources, more food, more energy and more space. The body has become a materialization of our obsession with growth. But what if we tried to turn this around? What if we use our increasing knowledge of the human body to shrink? If the 20th century was all about growth, perhaps the 21st century is about downsizing. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
The Incredible Shrinking Man is a speculative research project that investigates what it would take to downsize the human species to better fit the Earth. At first this seems like a preposterous idea, but certainly not more preposterous than the irrational appreciation of the fact that we continue to increase in size. We’ve long surpassed the limits of the healthy. At The Incredible Shrinking Man the greenhouse effect isn’t about CO2, it’s about people growing beyond natural limits because of their sheltered lives, much like plants in greenhouses. What happens when circumstances change? Auxologists like Robert Fogel and John Komlos continue to point out that global increased body height is the result of better food, better hygiene, better medicine and better living circumstances. And although increased height may indeed be the result of such improvements, height itself is not healthy and the question is if it is still a desired result in an age of increasing scarcity.
If your height increases by 20%, your body grows proportionally in all directions (1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 = 1.73). That means your weight actually increases by 73%. All that extra weight needs extra food, extra water, extra energy. From an evolutionary perspective being taller at some point in history undoubtedly represented an advantage. In this day and age however it’s a burden, on ourselves and on the planet. That’s why The Incredible Shrinking Man proposes to shrink the human species to 50cm. Again, this seems radical, but perhaps less so if you consider that the shortest person alive today, Chandra Bahadur Dangi from Nepal, is only a little over 54 centimeters tall. Thus 50cm is our theoretical goal, so as to make sure we map all known possibilities, and a little beyond. At 50cm we’d only need about 2% to 5% of the resources we need now, and although it is an extreme goal it’s also familiar because most babies are born this size.
Obviously there are many challenges in achieving an average universal human height of 50cm. For example, our brain size wouldn’t be much bigger than a walnut. One of the researchers for The Incredible Shrinking Man, Don Platt, is collecting evidence that brain cells could be much smaller without losing their function. It might even make us smarter since the distance an impulse has to travel is shorter. Other things are more difficult to control. How threatening would your cat become and what kinds of problems would large insects pose? What about the weather? Hail storms would become extremely dangerous. But we’re human. If anything, we’ve an established track record with proving our ingenuity in overcoming even the most difficult challenges. Also fear is a very unrewarding impulse if you’re trying to achieve new visions for mankind so at The Incredible Shrinking Man we like to think more of the adventures and new possibilities such a radical new idea would facilitate.
One of the most rewarding results of our shrinking would be the overwhelming and sustainable abundance of the natural and cultured environment. We would in fact shrink into a world of abundance. Renewable energy produced today would be more than enough to satisfy our demands. One tomato will make a decent soup and one chicken will feed a hundred. Redesigning the already built environment would take all of our imagination and inventiveness. Up to 95% of the cities could be recycled, condensed, ‘re-wilded’, or just left as a cultural and material resource for future generations. The Incredible Shrinking Man calculated that at 50cm the entire world population would be able to live in the six largest agglomerations, Tokyo, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Delhi and New York/Newark – leaving the rest of the world empty, or turned into agricultural lands. This redistribution of the human race would ask us to think of our relationship with the planet in ways unimaginable before.
The thing is that the Incredible Shrinking Man is actually working on a cultural paradigm shift. Away from our obsession with growth, towards an appreciation of smaller and less. It’s both pro-active and a way of coming to terms with a change in reality. This is as much about investigating the actual possibilities as it is about redesigning our desires, our needs and our biological and cultural make-up. We need to re-educate ourselves. Within The Incredible Shrinking Man we run into manifestations, projects and products that can help the research transform itself into the actual change it pursues.
This can be the development of an elixir to support slow growth rates while reducing the chance of cancer, it can be a celebration of lactose intolerance, or a letter to the Congolese government to protect the 135cm Mbuti pygmees from genetic extinction. It can be genetic growth experiments with zebrafish, or shrink experience machines to get a sense of what it would be like to be smaller. The most important thing is that we start rethinking and embrace the possibilities of the small because like the famous economic thinker Ernst Schumacher said: “Small is beautiful”.
The Nola series by Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn of Studio Drift comprises tinted glass bell-jars fitted into circular cork bases, with a ring of LEDs in a contrasting colour under the rim of each glass piece.
The colours mix as the brightly coloured light passes through the pastel glass and further combinations can be created by clustering several pieces together to layer up the different hues.
“Nola started as an experiment, playing with the endless possibilities combining colour and light in a spacial context,” Gordijn told Dezeen. “It became a landscape of light captured in glass bells.”
“By mixing and interconnecting multiple bells and placing them in overlapping compositions a complex spectacle of light emerges,” she added.
The lamps will go into production with new Dutch design label Buhtiq 31 in four different colours and four sizes, and each one comes with a dimmer switch.
The prototypes are on show for the first time as part of Eat Drink Design during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, which continues until Sunday.
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the penultimate stop on our Dezeen and MINI World tour is Eindhoven. In our first video report from the city, co-founder of Dutch Design Week Miriam van der Lubbe explains how the small industrial town has become one of the leading centres for design and technology in the world.
“Eindhoven is actually a very small city compared to the big capitals in Europe or the world,” says van der Lubbe. “It’s a group of about seven villages that grew together into Eindhoven.”
Eindhoven
It is also not a very pretty one. “The centre of Eindhoven really got destroyed [during the Second World War],” Van der Lubbe explains. “They built it up in the fifties and it became a really ugly city. In Eindhoven, it can only get better.”
Philips Light Tower, Eindhoven
Despite its size, the city has been a site for technological innovation since the industrial revolution, thanks almost entirely to Dutch electronics giant Philips.
The company was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 and, although it moved its headquarters to Amsterdam in 1997, its blue logo still adorns many of the buildings in the city.
Philips Klokgebouw building in Strijp-S, Eindhoven
Once Philips moved out, many people were afraid Eindhoven would become a “non-area”, Van der Lubbe says. In fact, the creative industries were quick to take advantage of the large amounts of cheap space Philips left behind.
Strijp-S, Eindhoven
One example Van der Lubbe takes us to is Strijp, a former Philips industrial complex that is now one of the central areas of Dutch Design Week.
Our MINI Paceman at Strijp-S, Eindhoven
“Strijp is a major part of Eindhoven centre actually,” says Van der Lubbe. “The owner of Strijp bought these industrial buildings and gave them to the creative people.”
Design Academy Eindhoven
An abundance of designers ready to take up these former industrial spaces graduate each year from Design Academy Eindhoven, which has gained a reputation as one of the foremost design schools in the world.
“It grew out of Philips, because they saw that design was an important aspect of products,” she says of the school.
Design Academy Eindhoven
“It used to be that as soon as people graduated they left. But now they’re coming back because they see that there’s something going on here that’s interesting.”
High Tech Campus, Eindhoven
There is still an emphasis on science and technology in Eindhoven. Van der Lubbe takes us to the High Tech Campus on the outskirts of the city, where many technology companies are based, as well as Eindhoven University of Technology.
Having design, industry, science and technology in such close proximity is the key to Eindhoven’s success, says Van der Lubbe.
Eindhoven University of Technology
“There is a huge opportunity for Eindhoven because it has all these aspects in it,” she says. “It has the academic world, it has science, it has the creative world, it definitely has industry.”
“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out and there is so much more that can actually happen here. I really believe that.”
Evoluon building, Eindhoven
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.
Opinion: on his return from Dutch Design Week, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs argues that “something special is happening” in Eindhoven, a dowdy post-industrial sprawl that was recently named “the most inventive city in the world”.
I’ve seen the future and it’s a small, ugly town in the south of Holland.
I’ve been in Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week for the past few days and the energy, creativity and imagination I’ve come across has been a revelation. Not only designers but entrepreneurs, civic leaders, restauranteurs and musicians are buzzing with an excitement and optimism that is both rare and genuine. They feel something special is happening in their city.
The trip is part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour and even though this is the smallest and least attractive of the cities we’ve visited this year – other stops have included New York, Singapore and London – it’s been by far the most interesting.
“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out,” says designer Miriam van der Lubbe in our first MINI World Tour report from the city. “And there’s so much more that can happen here”.
That accolade was based on research by the OECD, which found that the area leads the world in “patent intensity” – the number of patent applications per capita – a recognised way of measuring innovation. Eindhoven files 22.6 patents for every 10,000 people. San Diego, which is second on the list, files only 8.9.
It’s an incredible turnaround for a city that, in the eighties, feared it was staring into the abyss when Philips, the electronics giant that was the dominant economic and social force in Eindhoven, as good as abandoned the city with the loss of 30,000 jobs (out of a total population of around 200,000). Things were so bad the city seriously considered changing its name – “eind” is Dutch for “end” – lest people take it too literally.
Fearing the fate of Manchester, where the loss of heavy industry blighted the city centre for years, Eindhoven moved quickly to reinvent itself, giving abandoned Philips buildings to creative people who, true to the local spirit of hard work and cooperation, self organised and got on with building their own future.
Local authorities and developers around the world now commonly use such “creative seeding” to add buzz to an area to aid gentrification (and ultimately sell real estate) but in Eindhoven there appears to be a more equitable social construct to the way this is carried out.
Annemoon Geurts, the founder of Kazerne, a new creative industries hub in a former barracks in the city centre, told me that the city had offered her non-profit organisation an “erfpacht”, or social lease, on the building, meaning it would benefit from the value they added during their tenure. And with a 40-year lease, something that would be unheard of in short-term, money-grubbing London, they have an incentive to make long-term improvements.
Eindhoven’s design credentials are well known. Dutch Design Week (unofficial slogan: “What you see here today is what you’ll see in Milan in two years”) is one of the best curated and most vibrant design weeks. Design Academy Eindhoven is a serious contender for the title of world’s best design school and an increasing number of its stellar alumni (Piet Hein Eek, Kiki van Eijk, Joost van Bleiswijk and Formafantasma to name just a few) have remained in the city, running thriving studios.
But designers on their own can’t achieve much; if they aspire to more than just being another wannabe on the design-fair circuit they need an infrastructure of industry, R&D and other creative disciplines around them with whom they can make bigger ripples.
And Eindhoven has these in abundance. ASML, the world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer, is based in Eindhoven. A drive through even the dullest industrial estate in the city reveals companies specialising in cryogenics, photovoltaics and biotechnology. RPI Paro, the advanced print-on-demand printing facility that produced our Print Shift magazine, is based in Eindhoven. So is Shapeways, one of the leading 3D printing companies, who we interviewed for the Print Shift project.
These complimentary sectors tend to open their doors to creative minds, rather than turning them away, ripping them off or viewing them with suspicion, as is the common experience other cities including London. Designers in the city talk of an openness towards new ideas and a willingness to experiment that permeates industry, academia and the city government itself.
Interdisciplinary collaboration – so often an empty cliche – appears to be an everyday reality in Eindhoven and they even have a special term for it. Proeftuin, which literally means “experimental garden” or “test bed”, is a form of collaborative working between people of different disciplines that has been adopted by the city. Proeftuin was used to generate the city’s (alas, unsuccessful) bid strategy for European City of Culture 2018 and would also have formed a key part of cultural activity in 2018, had it won.
The attitude is most perfectly encapsulated by Dutch Design Week ambassador Daan Roosegaarde’s concept for removing smog from urban skies using an “electronic vacuum cleaner”, which he revealed in Eindhoven this week. Here a designer, researchers and politicians came together to address a real problem and found that between them they had the ingredients to do something about it.
In this case Eindhoven cannot claim these elements as its own: Roosegaarde is based near Rotterdam; the university is in Delft and the politicians are in Beijing. But Eindhoven can stake a convincing claim to the spirit, and that spirit offers a bright future.
Dutch Design Week 2013: a Dutch fashion textile brand that has a huge following in Africa but which is virtually unknown in Europe has announced a series of collaborations with contemporary designers (+ interview + slideshow).
Congo Chair by Theo Ruth for Artifort, 1952, covered with Studio Job’s print for Vlisco
Vlisco, a 167-year-old company that produces “grande, grotesque, outspoken” hand-printed textiles, staged an exhibition called Vlisco Unfolded exhibition in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week, presenting its new collection, archive material and its company history as well as a one-off print produced in collaboration with Studio Job.
Studio Job print for Vlisco
Vlisco’s creative director Roger Gerards said the collaboration with Studio Job was the first in series of projects with external designers. “We want to do more and more,” he told Dezeen. “There is a list of designers we are going to work with.”
Celebrate Winter 2013 collection. Photograph by Dirk Lambrechts
Vlisco, based in Helmond close to Eindhoven, employs 800 people and has an in-house design team of 50 people, yet is barely known in the Netherlands.
Celebrate Winter 2013 collection. Photograph by Dirk Lambrechts
“There’s a huge contradiction between how the brand is perceived in west Africa and how it’s perceived here,” said Gerards. “[But] I don’t mind that much that people don’t know us here. There are 400 million people living in west and central Africa and we are world famous there. You see people wearing us everywhere.”
Jeude Couleurs Winter 2013 collection. Photograph by Freudenthal Verhagen
Vlisco was founded in 1846 and its signature fabrics, made using a 21-stage process involving wax-based batik techniques, soon found favour in Africa, where they were bartered by Dutch traders en route to Indonesia, which was the intended market.
The company started to develop bold, colourful prints for African customers and today has a symbiotic relationship with the region, where its products have become part of local folklore.
Unseen Summer 2013 collection. Photograph by Barrie Hullegie
“In west Africa we’re more than just design; we’re also [part of the] culture,” said Gerards. “People claim and adopt our products. When we have a fashion show in a city such as Lagos it’s a huge event.”
Hommage L’Art Spring 2013. Photograph by Koen Hauser
Vlisco, together with fabric brands it owns in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, produced 65 million yards of fabric in 2012. Its key markets are Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as central and west African customers in major cities around the world.
Dazzling Graphics Spring 2011collection. Photograph by Fritz Kok
The Vlisco Group, which employs 2,700 people worldwide, was bought in 2010 by British investment group Actis, which plans to help the brand double its business by 2015. It had a turnover of €225 million in 2011, an increase of 20% on the previous year.
Vlisco Unfolded exhibition at Dutch Design Week 2013
The Vlisco Unfolded exhibition tells the story of the company and presents its products to the international design community for the first time.
Here’s the transcript of the interview with Vlisco’s creative director Roger Gerards:
Marcus Fairs: What is Vlisco?
Roger Gerards: Vlisco is a design brand based in this area of Eindhoven. We make textiles for west and central Africans living around the world. Besides the design we also manufacture in Holland. We have 800 people making our textiles.
Marcus Fairs: How did the company start?
Roger Gerards: More than 160 years ago a [Dutch] family bought a cotton printer. They had family in Indonesia and they started to make products for Indonesia using a batik technique. From 1900 on these products were also sold in west Africa and in this long relationship from then until today we’ve been making products for west African and central African consumers.
Vlisco Unfolded exhibition at Dutch Design Week 2013
Marcus Fairs: How did the design of the fabrics evolve?
Roger Gerards: The imagery slowly changed from very Indonesian batik styles to our current DNA, which is very outspoken drawings and very bold colours which we developed ourselves. The product is the result of a lot connections, history and craft. Until today we still work with the wax batik technique, and we are the only company in the world doing that.
Marcus Fairs: Describe how the company is perceived in Africa.
Roger Gerards: What’s beautiful about the Vlisco brand is that in west Africa we’re more than just design; we’re also [part of the] culture. People claim and adopt our products. When we have a fashion show in a city such as Lagos it’s a huge event. People fly in from Canada, Dubai, all Nigerians from the whole world want to see the Vlisco fashion show. I always feel New York better in Lagos than in New York.
Vlisco Unfolded exhibition at Dutch Design Week 2013
Marcus Fairs: It’s strange that you’re so unknown in Europe. Does that bother you?
Roger Gerards: There’s a huge contradiction between how the brand is perceived in west Africa and how it’s perceived here. I don’t mind that much that people don’t know us here. There are 400 million people living in west and central Africa and we are world famous there. You see people wearing us everywhere.
Marcus Fairs: Who designs the fabrics?
Roger Gerards: An important part of the company is that we have our own design department. We train our own designers because the technique and the DNA is so exceptional, you can’t compare it with other companies. We have to train our own designers. So we have 20 textile designers from around the world and we have 30 people assisting them. Besides that in the Netherlands we have 700 people working in manufacturing.
Vlisco Unfolded exhibition at Dutch Design Week 2013
Marcus Fairs: How are the fabrics made?
Roger Gerards: The manufacturing process is quite long. It takes 21 steps to make the product, and it takes two weeks from when the white cloth enters the factory to when it’s finished.
Marcus Fairs: You said this would be the “first and last” time you’ll exhibit at Dutch Design Week. Why are you doing it?
Roger Gerards: There are several reasons. Most importantly because we are in this area. People know Dutch design from the past, like Rietveld, very clean, very sober and very reflective. We are very outspoken, decorative – and we’re Dutch design. It’s totally made in a Dutch environment. We developed a new brand strategy in the last few years and we wanted to express that we are happy with the results. We are really growing a lot because of it and we’re doing a lot of design developments and collaborations and I want to share this with the Dutch Design Week audience.
Vlisco Unfolded exhibition at Dutch Design Week 2013
Marcus Fairs: Why have you collaborated with Studio Job on a limited-edition print?
Roger Gerards: I wanted to work with Studio Job because their design language and outspokenness and I feel a big concoction between what we are doing and what they are doing. All the fabrics that are worn by west Africans, they are very grande, very grotesque, very outspoken. It’s about couture and having presence. I think Studio Job is also very iconic and outspoken. As we both are Dutch designers it’s very good to make this connection. We made a limited edition fabric for this occasion but also he is using our fabrics for projects he is doing.
Marcus Fairs: Will you do more collaborations with contemporary designers?
Roger Gerards: Yes we want to do more and more. There is a list of designers we are going to work with.
Vlisco Unfolded exhibition at Dutch Design Week 2013
Dutch Design Week 2013: Dutch designer Elisa van Joolen has taken left over sample shoes from sports brand Nike and turned them inside-out to create new footwear (+ slideshow).
Elisa van Joolen contacted Nike and acquired its sample stock from previous seasons that would have been disposed of otherwise.
She then recycles the sneakers and creates new designs by cutting off the bottoms, turning the material inside out and stitching on bases of cheap sandals.
“I emphasise the potential of the depreciated samples and give them a new life,” said Van Joolen.
Inverting the shoes removes any branding across the design, plus reveals different colours and graphics from the internal parts.
Elastic straps that hold the tongue in place create stripes down the sides of the shoes and the “sample not for resale” text printed on the inner forms graphics toward the back.
Van Joolen uses the soles cut from the shoes to make flip-flops, punching holes in them and threading laces through so they act like straps.
“Van Joolen gives a new meaning to recycling,” said the jury. “With this collection she kicks in the shins of international footwear brands and shows them that recycling can go hand in hand with a nice product. It is not often that such a good story is converted to an interesting result.”
Dutch Design Week 2013: the aluminium structures of these cabinets by Rotterdam studio Minale-Maeda poke through their plywood skins to create a coloured grid on the inside and dashed patterns on the outside.
The Wrong Colour Furniture System by Minale-Maeda has a structure made of anodised aluminium, with teeth in the bars that bite into the plywood panels and secure them in place once slotted together.
Each bar is colour-coded in cyan, magenta and yellow according to its orientation. The ends of the bars pierce the plywood panels where they are attached, creating a distinctive grid pattern on the outside with vertical cyan dashes and horizontal magenta ones.
The yellow components are only visible behind the legs and inside the cabinets, framing each module with a yellow square.
“The name Wrong Colour comes from the idea that it is like an X-ray of a piece of furniture, processed with imaging technologies like in baggage scanners to highlight differences in densities between materials and better separate them when they overlap,” Minale-Maeda told Dezeen. “It follows the idea that the project is about transparency in production and construction, and the colours are crucial in highlighting the separate elements.”
“The other reason to have three different colours is that they serve as a guide in the assembly of the piece, because each plane has a separate colour so it aids in picking the right parts for each panel and later in assembling the panels into a box,” they added.
The modular units can be stacked in different configurations and can be ordered with or without doors direct from the designers. “There is great flexibility in materials and colours that we are experimenting with, so custom schemes is one direction we are developing and the other is having a greater variety of module sizes,” they said.
Wrong Colour Furniture System was nominated for the Dutch Design Awards and is on show alongside the other shortlisted projects as part of Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven until Sunday.
“Many influences converge in this piece of furniture, including those of Rietveld, Mondriaan and Japanese culture,” commented the selection committee. “It is a modular system turned inside out in an interesting way.”
Dutch Design Week 2013:Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Dave Hakkens has made his own machines for recycling plastic to make new products locally and plans to share the designs so others around the world can do the same.
The Precious Plastic machines by Dave Hakkens include a plastic shredder, extruder, injection moulder and rotation moulder, which are all based on industrial machines but modified to be less complex and more flexible.
“Of all the plastic thrown away, I’ve heard that we recycle just ten percent and I wondered why we recycle so little,” Hakkens told Dezeen at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show opening on Saturday.
One of the issues turned out to be a lack of demand for recycled material from factories, so he visited a range of firms making plastic products to ask why they weren’t using recycled plastic. He found that difficulties with sorting plastics for recycling make the resultant material less reliable than brand new plastic.
“I went to all these companies and I realised that the machines they use to build plastic products are really expensive, very precise and efficient, and [the manufacturers] don’t want to use recycled plastic because it’s not as pure so it could damage the machinery or slow down production,” he explained.
“I wanted to make my own tools so that I could use recycled plastic locally,” Hakkens continued. First he modified a shredder and collected unwanted plastic from his friends, family and neighbours. This allowed him to grind empty bottles and containers into small plastic chips in a mixture of colours.
He then built three machines for melting the plastic and manufacturing new products with it, using a combination of new custom-made components and reclaimed parts like an old oven that he found at a scrapyard.
Extrusion samples
Having perfected the systems so they could handle inconsistencies in the recycled plastic, he designed a small range of products to make and sell.
At the academy show there’s an injection-moulded spinning top, a lamp made by extruding a ribbon of plastic and wrapping it round a mould, and a rotation-moulded waste paper bin, but Hakkens stresses that the processes could be adapted to make a wide variety of different products.
Rotation moulding samples
“In the end you have this set of machines that can start this local recycling and production centre,” he said, explaining that while mass-manufacturers are put off recycled plastic as a material because they need optimum efficiency and accuracy, a local craftsperson making batches of products could afford to work more slowly and make allowances for material inconsistencies.
In addition to setting up his own workshop in Eindhoven, Hakkens intends to publish the blueprints online so that people around the world can create their own local recycling and manufacturing centres, and adapt his designs for their own production needs.
“The idea is that you can make whatever moulds you want for it – so I made this, but I prefer that everybody can just use them and make whatever they want and start setting up their production,” he said. “People can just make [the machines] on the other side of the world, and maybe send some feedback and say ‘maybe you can do this better.'”
He also suggested that local residents who collect plastic waste and bring it to the workshop could be paid a small fee according to the weight of raw material they donate, and predicted that his system could be put to use making filament for 3D printers.
Dutch Design Week 2013: designer Daan Roosegaarde has unveiled a “Lego from Mars” installation consisting of hundreds of wireless LED crystals that light up when placed on the floor (+ movie).
Crystal, a permanent installation that has opened in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week, allows visitors to arrange the glowing crystals in patterns – and even steal them.
“We made thousands of little crystals which have two LEDs in them,” Roosegaarde told Dezeen. “When they’re placed in the area that you see here, they light up. It’s a sort of Lego from Mars. You can play, you can interact, you can steal them.”
There’s no battery, no cables,” he added. “The floor has a weak magnetic field, which gives light to the Crystals by wireless power.”
The installation is located in a void created at the newly refurbished Natlab, a building that once contained the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (Philips Physics Laboratory) and which played a key role in the development of products including the electric lightbulb and the compact disc.
“This location is quite special. Philips produced the lightbulb here; Einstein worked here on a lot of ideas,” said Roosegaarde. “So the city commissioned us to think about the future of light, where light gets liberated. It jumps out of the lightbulb and becomes free.”
LEDs are housed inside plastic tokens which visitors can tesselate to form patterns or words. Roosegaarde plans to publish the designs so that people can produce their own open-source versions in future.
“Every month we will make new crystals,” said Roosegaarde. “We will open-source how to make them, so students can make their own in different colours and shapes. New crystals will arrive and I will have nothing to do with it. People can do whatever they want. In that way it becomes an eco-system of behaviour. That’s going to be super-exciting, to let go of control and see what will happen.”
Visitors to the installation have already used the Crystals to write messages, including a marriage proposal. “We had one lady whose boyfriend proposed to her last night. He wrote ‘Marry me’ and he brought her here.”
Daan Roosegaarde: “People can play and share their stories of light”
At the start of the Dutch Design Week on Saturday 19 October the interactive light artwork CRYSTAL can be experienced in Eindhoven. The permanent artwork consists out of hundreds of LED-crystals which brighten when people touch them. Artist Daan Roosegaarde calls them “Lego from Mars”. The name refers not only to its futuristic design, but also to its endless potential to play. CRYSTAL has been previously exhibited in Amsterdam, Paris, Moscow and is now permanent in Eindhoven NL.
The Crystals are placed in a black tunnel at the Natlab, the place where Einstein once worked, where Philips produced its lightbulbs, and the first CD-ROM was presented. They are part of the light program Light-S which wants to create new experiences between people and space. CRYSTAL is a perfect match, the Crystals are white geometric shapes with LEDs inside. The local floor has a magnetic field which allows the Crystals to light-up. CRYSTAL is therefore one of the latest innovations in light. The artwork CRYSTAL can be experienced at night at Natlab, Kastanjelaan 500 in Eindhoven NL.
Interactive crystals
CRYSTAL is not only innovatie in terms of appearance, but also the interactive element makes the artwork unique. With Crystals people can share their creativity. For example someone used Crystals for a wedding proposal to his girlfriend by writing the letters ‘Marry me’. Artist Daan Roosegaarde describes this phenomenon as “Facebook Square”, where social media and light are combined to create new public places.
The future with CRYSTAL
Studio Roosegaarde will continue to make new Crystals with the vision that light is enhancing the relation between people and their environment. The coming years the studio will develop Crystals with different shapes and colors together with high-tech companies and cultural organisations. Crystal keeps on growing.
About Daan Roosegaarde
Daan Roosegaarde (Nieuwkoop, 1979) is artist, innovator and ambassador of the Dutch Design Week 2013. With his Studio Roosegaarde he explores the relationship between art and technology to make the world more interesting, better or beautiful. Interactive designs such as ‘Dune’ and ‘Smart Highway’ have been exhibited around the world. www.studioroosegaarde.net
About Light-S
Light-S is an innovative project by the city of Eindhoven and Park Strijp Beheer. Within Light-S several projectteams are researching how light can create new experiences between people, space and technologies. www.light-s.nl
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