DAE Graduation Show 2021 – Photo by Cleo Goossens, courtesy of Dutch Design Week.

Design – During Dutch Design Week, Design Academy Eindhoven has presented the DAE Graduation Show 2021 exhibition and navigational index inviting to explore the themes, keywords, materials and methodologies of the 163 graduation projects ranging from fashion to technology and sustainable innovation. Archipanic’s editor in chief Enrico Zilli explored the exhibition – check the projects we liked the best!

• RELATED STORIES: Read more about Dutch Design Week 2021 on Archipanic…

The Human-Cloud Project

©Femke Reijerman.

Filips Stanislavskis has created a series of tools that turn human breath into clouds. His Human-Cloud Project comprises a breath condensation device collecting the user’s exhalations. A weather balloon carries the liquid breaths to the sky and the cloud generator vaporises them, forming a momentary human cloud, a Cumulus Homomutatus. “With the development of climate engineering technology and propositions for artificial cloud creation, we cast ourselves as masters and managers of nature. But what if instead of controlling nature, we were to use cloud seeding technology to create a sense of belonging to the weather?”

Melodic Gestures

©Pierre Castignola.

“In many sports, athletes unconsciously use the sound of their movements to assess their skills.” Says Edern Janneau. His Melodic Gesture graduation project explores the relationship between gesture and sound through the practice of sport. The table sings the movement of the players, translating movement into music. Around Melodic Gesture, sport isn’t only a competitive stake but a shared creative experience—[Watch the video].

The House of Queer Joy

©Nicole Marnati.

Clodagh Read developed The House of Queer Joy, a tactile tent as a physical expression and celebration of queer people’s need for space and community. An itinerant home for conversation and connection, its walls are a patchwork of personal quotes about the meaning of queer space. Its vibrant colours and textiles evoke the community’s diversity: from club kids and leather kink to activists and drag houses. Intended for events and gatherings, the tent’s neon lighting invites visitors to read, learn and share their thoughts on building solidarity together.

Emotional healing garments

©Iris Rijskamp.

Laura Deschl has developed The Healing Imprint, a therapeutic garment made to help heal trauma. The active wear-like fashion design combines acupressure – a non-invasive practice originating in traditional Chinese medicine – and trauma-informed yoga. The custom-knit garments and textiles have a grid through which small massage balls can be moved to reach specific acupressure points. The project “seeks to destigmatize the realm of mental health and the traces of trauma left on the body” by merging science, business, medicine, psychiatry and textile-making.

The empowering dress for untamable women

©Pierre Castignola.

During the first wave of the pandemic, Hsin Min Chan was monitored by a 24-hour surveillance camera in an isolation ward. She was released only after she performed hysteria and despair. This dehumanising experience of the medical gaze made her not only conscious of similar gazes in her daily life, but she realised that she could manipulate perceptions and empower herself by exploiting being viewed as an object. The result is the To-be-looked-at-ness project, a sculptural dress that exaggerates the to-be-looked-at-ness of the woman who wears it. It thereby functions as a suit of armour that makes the woman unapproachable and autonomous, no longer owned or disciplined by men’s gaze.

Repurposing forgotten silos

©Femke Reijerman.

Due to agricultural optimisation and climate-goal-related reduced livestock, many abandoned grain silos populate the Dutch rural landscape. Stella van Beers converted a forgotten storage container into a two-level watchtower residence, acting on a childhood fascination. Accessible via a spiral staircase, the vertical human shelter features a light-filled living area, loft bedroom and lookout porthole for rooftop views. “In prototyping a universal silo conversion method, I address the broader issue of repurposing post-agricultural equipment.”

From human poo to fertile soil

©Femke Reijerman.

Rebecca Schedler’s SymbioPunk is a bioreactor and compost system that converts human faeces into fertile hummus by introducing a fungi cultures to perform the digestion. The project “invites us to reconsider the taboo around the natural process of defecation by showing how the human waste becomes valuable first as an essential food for the mushroom, which in turn produces a fertiliser that can be used for cultivation purposes.”

Melting ceramics to the extreme

©Femke Reijerman.

Overfiring, the excessive heat treatment of clay, is usually undesirable in ceramics as it leads to deformation, bloating and ruined pieces. But for Olivier van der Mark that’s when things get interesting. Using high temperatures as a defining element, his Melting Ceramics project is a practice-based exploration of what happens when you push a material to its limits.

• All photos of DAE Graduation Show 2021: courtesy of Design Academy Eindhoven and Dutch Design Week.