Expedition Aequalis – Courtesy of Dutch Design Week.
Design – With Expedition Aequalis, Dutch Invertuals teamed up with The Future Laboratory and Reon Brand to go on a mission: exploring new design approaches towards an eco-centric future. An exhibition at Dutch Design Week 2022 presented the work of eight designers aiming to rebalance our relationship with Nature, putting the health of planetary ecosystems above our own needs.
- RELATED STORIES: Read more about Dutch Design Week on Archipanic.
©Roland Smit.
What if we could acknowledge and perceive the world from another species’ perspective?
Delphine Lejeune presents Insecta Spectra, an olfactive installation exploring the pollination mechanisms of species that blossom in the darkness. The work highlights the species’ behaviour to attract insects in an attempt to achieve propagation successfully. Insecta Spectra invites visitors to experience a new kind of Nature with full senses based on digital production.
©Roland Smit.
How can we design products that are beneficial beyond human application but serve numerous species at once?
Johanna Seelemann’s Habitat project explores new ways for products that could be claimed by other organisms while and after human use. By doing so, she attempts to amplify the scope of an object, building on the idea that items, and the materials they are made of, can never really be owned but rather borrowed, consumed, and inhabited for a specific period of time.
Courtesy of Dutch Design Week.
How can we challenge our material expectations based on consumerism and globalized perfection?
With the Crust furniture series Studio ThusThat challenges our expectations of everyday materials, showing aluminum in an unexpected form. Crusts are thin aluminum plates cut off during the casting process. In an age of finite resources, where secondary materials will become the norm, the collection’s rough surfaces and undulating, organic textures will contribute to changing the aesthetics of materials at their core.
©Roland Smit.
How can we learn from Nature’s fluid sexualities, gender variations, and interactions?
When it comes to sexuality and gender, Nature worked out extremely creative design solutions going beyond our rigid binary way of thinking. For example, male seahorses go through pregnancy and give birth to their offspring, while white-throated sparrows can have two body types and four genders. Dae Uk Kim’s work displays and celebrates these diversities, pushing us to think of ourselves differently. By visualizing a seahorse pregnancy with human features, he poses the question: “Can we view human diversity as part of Nature? What can we learn from Nature’s richness and fluidity?”
Courtesy of Dutch Design Week.
No matter how advanced our technology is, it will not outperform the cosmic balance of Nature… Or will it?
Even if we believe we can rule the world with our cutting-edge technologies, Nature has the power to restore its cosmic balance, even if it has to do so by a complete reset. Edhv visualizes the rebalancing force of Nature by speeding up such a process on an object that has become symbolic of human intelligence: the smartphone.
Could the visualization of water as a philosophical entity shape new paths toward a respectful and symbiotic relationship?
Moon Seop Seo and Katharina Sook Wilting’s installation displays the caustic effect created when light hits the water. This reflection in motion resembles an electrocardiogram, reminding the viewer of the importance of the interaction of water and light, which enables life on our planet. Informed by the different ways in which water is worshiped and respected in indigenous cultures and communities, the work underlines the utilitarian way in which water is approached within our current economic system.
©Roland Smit.
What kinds of luminous bonds appear when quantum particles collide?
Created by Audrey Large and Theóphile Blandet, Up, Charm, Top, Down, Strange, Bottom consists of intertwined elements that float in space and carry a continuous flow of electrically-charged light. The fused elements evoke the instability and chemical bonding of quarks flavors. Particles move through six translucent “gems” that illuminate when activated by drops of polished liquid aluminum. The combinations are manifold and maintain the ever-changing balance of this luminous mobile.
Photo by ©Roland Smit.
How can we enhance plants’ agency and ability to travel by becoming more receptive to the signals and data our environment produces?
In a future scenario where rising sea levels and extreme drought have endangered the survival of several species, Anna Resei’s Inter-Organism Transceiver project brings to light the non-visible communications between species. Instead of traditional agriculture, where humans decide over the placement and use of plants, she proposes we listen and follow their natural way of propagating, becoming a part of an inter-organism process of migration and adaptation.
©Roland Smit.
