This year, three themes stand out. Circularity is currently seen as the way to achieve (climate) goals and designers address these sustainability issues in radically different ways. The designers also speculate about the way technology is increasingly affecting our lives and, to a large extent, restore power to the source: the human being. And, in a time of fake news and Instagram, impact and trust are of the utmost importance. In response to this, many designers are developing an alternative image or new language.

The rise of digital innovations presents encouraging opportunities for devising solutions to some of the most urgent issues facing today’s society. Such innovations and societal challenges call for cooperation between different disciplines and industries. Many of the current designers focus on researching and developing innovative and alternative work and production methods. The young generation of designers increasingly ventures beyond the boundaries of their own discipline(s) and continues to search for (new) forms of collaboration, with a variety of (also commercial) parties, and on the basis of other business models.