A confession: I’m surprised to find myself offering an assessment of the 2023 Dutch Design Awards. I have never sat on the judging panel for the scheme, do not live or work regularly in the Netherlands, and am somewhat confused as to what “Dutch design” even means in any critical sense, particularly given that national borders are not the determining factor in design they once were. Put charitably, I am radically impartial; less kindly, dangerously unqualified.

Uncertainty, however, is not the worst trait with which you can approach contemporary design, a field whose horizons are now wide enough to encompass complexities, contradictions and complements of every kind. In fact, given this breadth, I’m not sure that anyone has a clear answer as to what Dutch design is today. The field has, after all, lost much of the specific flavour that it seemed to have at the time of Droog Design in the early 1990s, [1] when a number of practitioners in the region shared a pool of common references and approaches (a phenomenon unlikely to repeat itself given the decentralising impact on design discourse of the internet), but this does not mean that the field is any poorer for it.

What makes contemporary Dutch design interesting is not some outdated image of national exceptionalism, but rather its role as a microcosm of the field worldwide. The Dutch design scene is a varied community of practitioners, each working in radically different ways, and each of whom may be Dutch in myriad different ways: by birth, by base, by training, by project, or, crucially, by virtue of the support that their work receives. If national design identities mean anything, it is through the infrastructural systems by which they operate, be it education, employment opportunities, or transmission to wider publics. In this respect, the Dutch Design Awards are an integral engine for driving the field forward: the recognition and support that they provide practitioners with is something of which the Netherlands can be proud.

Something else to be proud of is the plurality of different design practices that the nominees for the 2023 awards represent – variety, after all, is the sign of a healthy ecosystem. From within the projects selected for recognition come designs that offer new systems, solutions, and social structures; designs targeted at consumers, non-humans, and overarching legal frameworks; designs that celebrate, critique, simplify, and complicate. For those seeking clarity as to what design is today, I’m not sure that much succour is on offer. Whatever contemporary Dutch design may be, it is clearly many-headed.

Even within single project, numerous forces may be at play. Legal Innovation: The North Sea Speaks, for example, is a body of research that offers a full sense of the scope and scale to which the field now extends. Created by the Embassy of the North Sea, the project staged a practice mock judicial proceeding at the Peace Palace in the Hague, arguing for the sea to be given legal rights as an independent entity, reframed from its current status as defined through its utility to humans. Marrying legal investigation, public performance, and environmental advocacy, it is a project that demonstrates the capacity for design to frame and intervene in questions of urgent social value, and give physical form to ideas for how we might reshape society more equitably.

A consummate design project, then, but far from the only way in which the field operates. Simone Post’s Candy Land installation for Hermès, for example, offers a vision of design that is unabashed in its delight in materiality, craft, and childhood nostalgia, comprising shop window displays in which domestic interiors have been perfectly replicated in sweeties.

Post’s work is technically brilliant – a study of how unexpected materials can confound, charm and lead familiar typologies to take on new forms – but also gleefully silly and deliciously evocative. There are window frames knitted out of braided marshmallows, curtains woven with fizzy flying saucers, and chandelier pendants dripping with candy necklaces. There is no explicit social message here, but rather fantasy, humour and escape – we need these things too.

If there is a connection between the two projects, it is that both position design as a form of communication, albeit one in which the medium and content of that communication vary dramatically across projects. Super Local’s From the Himalayas, as another example, raises awareness of the environmental impact on Nepal’s Sagarmatha National Park through the high levels of tourism generated by the allure of Mount Everest – Dutch design, it would seem, has a healthy disrespect for national borders. The designers have established a system in which plastic waste can be transported from the park to Kathmandu to be recycled, with this material subsequently used to create souvenirs that are available to purchase by visitors to Sagarmatha. These objects fund the park’s clean-up operation, but also allow visitors to express their support for a more environmentally conscious form of tourism (or, perhaps, salve their consciences).

These kinds of practical systems through which meaningful change may be brought about are valuable, but sometimes acts of communication and representation are enough in themselves. The Rotterdam- based organisation Tailors & Wearers, for example, platforms Afro-Surinamese fashion and costume design, producing educational programmes, community-led documentation, and ongoing cultural research. The group brings together different generations of practitioners from across the community, foregrounding their heritage and forms of making and self- expression in the design process. Regardless of their projects’ results, the practice of these skills is itself worthwhile – they are modes of design that are worthy of celebration and preservation, and which endure through their performance, not their outcomes.

These glimpses onto moments of diverse practice and ideas are what I take from the 2023 Dutch Design Awards. The present landscape is too complex, too gloriously messy, to offer an easy answer as to what Dutch design is, or as to what contemporary design period may be. The field is fractured, expansive, and shimmeringly multivalent, leaving any effort to grasp its full scope doomed to fail. In this vein, the nominees of the Dutch Design Awards are welcome moments of partial illumination – flashes of light that reveal individual visions of what design may be, and what it might become, but which leave much still to be determined. There is, happily, a pleasure in embracing this uncertainty – sometimes it’s nice not to be an expert.

International view
Oli Stratford
Editor in chief Disegno
disegnojournal.com

[1] And the “seemed” here is important. Around the world, a number of groups such as Decolonising Design have done invaluable work in pointing out that countless practitioners and communities have traditionally been excluded by discussions of so-called national design identities.