Manon van Hoeckel designs encounters. Taking the daily lives of the target group as a starting point, she develops tools for social impact that offer new insights and encourage strangers to connect. Her work often focuses on overlooked groups: undocumented refugees, women in prison, homeless youngsters, the elderly, and people in a home for the mentally disabled. Be it through interventions, programmes, or ideas, she brings people together while addressing the need for systemic change that goes beyond product solutions. Social design projects become a way through. Van Hoeckel asks topical and relevant questions, in light of the disappearance of the conversation in public space, in politics and between different groups in our society. Through these designed encounters she formulates original solutions that reveal the transformative power of design in a natural way. 

Since graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2014 with a mobile embassy for undocumented refugees, Manon continues creating interventions encouraging strangers to talk to each other. For ‘Boijmans wassalon’ (2017-2018), she placed a free and fully working launderette at the museum Boijmans van Beuningen entrance. With your dirty laundry as a free ticket to the museum, it questioned the museum’s role, inviting people from the neighbourhood who had never set foot in the museum before while offering a timeframe for unexpected conversations. Recently she worked on Bouwdepot: a trajectory aimed at building self-confidence and self-direction among homeless youth. By providing young people in a vulnerable position with a stable basis, they can start building a better future. In a project for Kleinkijkacademie Manon disguised herself as a window cleaner and engaged with residents with severe mental or multiple disabilities, turning the everyday care task into a creative opportunity to connect and interact.

manonvanhoeckel.com