Tenderlymilitant.exe by Anna Zoe Hamm at Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show 2025- Photo by Femke Reijerman.
Design. During Dutch Design Week 2025, the Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show 2025 brought together 200 Bachelor’s and Master’s graduates, offering a glimpse into Gen Z’s world through design. From neuroscience and activism to rethinking crafts, communication glitches, and even farming, their projects explore new ways to reconnect with nature and heritage—imagining a future that is more sustainable, inclusive, and truly humane. Check the projects we liked the most.
RELATED STORIES: Read more about Dutch Design Week 2025 on Archipanic.
Design activism on a tree top
Celeste Zion at DAE Graduation Show 2025 – Photo by Ronald Smits.
Céleste Zion’s Uprising Canopy is activism transformed into architecture. Born from forest occupations resisting a highway in southern France, it’s built entirely by hand from fallen trees. A 3.3-metre-high platform houses tools for peaceful protest—musical instruments, cassette players, goggles, a tea kit, and a hammock. A sound performance explores healing activist trauma, while a smaller structure displays archival photos of the occupation. Her installation at the Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show 2025 invites visitors to reflect on collective resilience, protest, and care. Here, architecture becomes a living memory, a sanctuary, and a testament to the power of community action.
A starter kit for ‘rewilded’ farming
Benjamin Onno Dikmans at DAE Graduation Show 2025 – Photo by Nicole Marnati.
Benjamin Onno Dikmans’ Rewild Farming: Starter Kit turns farming into a community adventure. This mobile workspace, built from repurposed shipping containers, comes packed with modular essentials—workbenches, shelving, tool storage, a kitchen unit, power outlets, lighting, and even an expandable scaffolding system. Adaptable to local needs, it supports small-scale regenerative projects, while a digital platform connects communities, sharing know-how and inspiring collaboration for ecosystem restoration.
Dancefloor as a shared symphony of brainwaves
Stan Wijnands at DAE Graduation Show 2025 – Photo by Ronald Smits.
Dancefloor Synergy by Stan Wijnands turns dancing into a shared symphony of minds. Participants wear EEG headsets that track brain activity, with the intensity of their synchronicity shaping evolving tones and sound effects. The installation transforms the dance floor into a playful stage where movement becomes music, and bodies communicate beyond words. Drawing on research into interpersonal resonance, the project makes invisible connections audible, inviting participants to feel the unspoken rhythm of togetherness. Here, dance is not just expression—it’s a living dialogue, a celebration of connection and joy across cultures.
Sharing through weaving
Floor Berkhout at DAE Graduation Show 2025 – Photo by Nicole Marnati.
Floor Berkhout’s Born under Thread reimagines computing as a tactile, human-centred process. By weaving conductive threads with microcomputers, she transforms a loom into a responsive system where touch and rhythm shape how information is transmitted. The installation makes computation material, visible, and participatory, highlighting the labour—especially women’s—that underpins both weaving and technology. Rooted in permacomputing principles, it emphasises sustainability, presence, and relational design. Visitors engage directly with the system, turning interaction into interface and materiality into knowledge—a poetic reminder that technology can be felt, crafted, and grounded in everyday life.
Riding on a broomstick for gentle activism
Anna Zoe Hamm at DAE Grad Show 2025- Photo by Femke Reijerman.
Tenderlymilitant.exe by Anna Zoe Hamm reimagines brooms as tools of care and gentle resistance. Drawing on plants’ hidden defence strategies and historical links to female labour, witchcraft, and martial arts, each broom becomes a symbol of soft militancy. The project challenges the idea that weapons are solely violent, proposing care as a radical, empowering force. By transforming everyday objects into vessels of emotional activism, Hamm turns domesticity into defiance, nurturing into rebellion, and history into inspiration—inviting us to rethink how resistance can be gentle, strategic, and profoundly human.
Tweaking machines’ processes
Anika Greyling at DAE Show 2025 – Photo by Ronald Smits.
Anika Greyling’s Layered Lines project at the Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show 2025 turns 3D printing into a playful collaboration with the machine. Instead of letting automation take full control, she tweaks parameters like fan speed, extrusion rate, and cooling, allowing gravity and material behaviour to shape the outcome. The result is textured, unexpected objects with potential for furniture or architectural applications. By embracing unpredictability, Greyling challenges the notion of perfect replication, showing that design can emerge from a dialogue between human intuition and technology—a creative partnership in which mistakes become opportunities and machines become collaborators rather than mere tools.
The ‘Power’ of facing scarcity together
Sara Ballout at DAE Show 2025 – Photo by Ronald Smits.
Sara Ballout’s Networks of Necessity project explores how communities in Lebanon and the Middle East navigate energy scarcity during crisis. Using an uprooted electrical pole as a tactile installation, visitors flip circuit breakers to activate shifting sounds and visuals, experiencing fragmented power firsthand. A stitched textile map and open-source digital archive reveal how informal, decentralised networks provide resilience when state systems fail. The project highlights everyday ingenuity and collective empowerment, turning abstract ideas of energy justice into immersive, human-scale experiences. Here, design celebrates solidarity, creativity, and the quiet strength of communities working together.
Making precise moulding unpredictable
Mateusz Dryński at DAE Graduation Show 2025 – Photo by Carlfried Verwyaaien
Moulds are usually all about precision—but what if they could surprise us? With 1511, Mateusz Dryński turns traditional moulding on its head, creating a playful system of controlled chaos. He casts a solid plaster block, then fractures it into 1,511 pieces, which form a reconfigurable puzzle. By stacking, arranging, and leaving gaps, the voids are later filled with porcelain, producing one-of-a-kind ceramic vases. The project celebrates unpredictability within structure, where meticulous craftsmanship meets spontaneous creativity—a perfect balance of control and joyful experimentation.
Shaping togetherness through glitches
Composing Interference by Greta Munaro at DAE Show 2025 – Photo by Femke Reijerman
Greta Munaro’s Composing Interference turns electromagnetic chaos into art you can touch and hear. Using DIY antennas, the installation captures live signal clashes, transforming them into audiovisual performances on screens and speakers. Visitors can move antennas to reshape the sounds and visuals, making interference a playful, participatory act. Instead of a glitch, instability becomes a creative tool, revealing hidden communication infrastructures. The project challenges assumptions about noise and order, showing that even disruption can be a source of beauty, engagement, and political reflection—turning everyday electronic chaos into an immersive, interactive experience.
Fostering emotional connection with loved ones living with dementia
Bruno by Karin Pinto at DAE Graduation Show 2025 – © Karin Pinto.
Karin Pinto’s Bruno is a radio redesigned for people living with dementia, blending care and autonomy. Inspired by her father’s lifelong love of radios, she created a simple, tactile device with one large button, allowing users to control when they listen to music or voice messages from loved ones. Bruno supports daily rituals, fosters independence, and preserves emotional connection even as memory fades. By turning a familiar object into a bridge between self and community, Pinto demonstrates how thoughtful design can be both intimate and empowering, transforming sound into comfort, memory, and agency.
- All photos are courtesy of Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show 2025.
