Designing Society tijdens Dutch Design Week

What if there’s another way?

Every day, we move through a world that has been designed. The way we live, work, care for one another and relate to our surroundings is shaped by ideas about how we want to live together. Many of these expectations have become so deeply ingrained that we barely notice them. Until they start to feel restrictive, and no longer fit the world we live in.

In Designing Society, Dutch Design Foundation brings designers and researchers together with citizens, public authorities and social organisations to tackle issues that affect us all. Social tensions, the climate crisis and growing inequality call for a collective approach. At the same time, familiar ways of thinking and working increasingly fall short. The exhibition explores how design can help break old patterns, bring in different perspectives and put new ideas to the test.

This shift in perspective runs throughout Designing Society. We ask questions, present ideas and explore alternatives together. As a visitor, you might step into an experiment yourself, join a conversation or share your story. Not everything is set in stone: the exhibition is a place where different perspectives can open up new possibilities.

Care for life

The way we care for one another is changing. In A Healthy Sense of Excitement, ActiZ, care professionals and designers explore what this means for care for older people. Six projects experiment with new ways of working. You can meet an older version of yourself through AI and reflect on autonomy and quality of life, or design the place you would want to live in when you are older.

The Last Chapter, by VVT Platform Zuidoost-Brabant, Samen Precies! and We Are Social Rebels, also explores what it means to grow older. At its heart is the belief that care should follow life. A life-sized digital book and interactive bookcase let you discover other people’s memories, wishes and choices, and add your own story.

The First 1000 Days focuses on giving every child the best possible start in life. The first thousand days are crucial to a child’s development, but not every family starts from the same position. Generatie Gezond Brabant and Circus Andersom collect parents’ knowledge and experiences in an installation of a thousand cans filled with stories, life lessons, hopes and doubts.

Life in a healthy environment

What would a home look like if wellbeing shaped its design from the start? In Building for Wellbeing, Heijmans explores this question together with Afdeling Buitengewone Zaken, Rombout Frieling lab and cocosmos, looking at three different scales: the home, infrastructure and the neighbourhood.

With G³, the Building Happiness Score, Heijmans and experts from the worlds of science and design explore how well buildings meet the needs of the people who use them and what could be improved.

In Declaration of Dependence, Heijmans and designer Fides Lapidaire rethink land ownership: what if we saw ourselves not as owners, but as stewards of the soil and water? With a Deed of Release, you can symbolically return a piece of land to itself.

In Drinkable Nature, PWN and designer Katinka Versendaal connect the water from our taps to the landscape it comes from. Water moves through soil, plants, animals, other organisms and our own bodies, but climate change, pollution and salinisation are putting this system under pressure. Clean drinking water starts with a healthy landscape. Or, as the project puts it: when you drink water, you drink the landscape.

Opening up space for change

In Duurzame CAO, Aha!, the Dutch government, trade unions and Atelier-AW explore how small workplace experiments can help make an organisation more sustainable. From office days to lunch choices, new ideas are tested together with employees to find out what works and what could work better.

The PONT Workshop, designed by De Reuringdienst, presents three years of experience with design in the public sector. PONT shares knowledge and tools for confronting complex societal challenges, while three Public Design Coalitions show how organisations use design to tackle them together.

At Un/School, change starts by consciously unlearning something. The platform challenges you to write down a habit, assumption or way of working that you want to let go of, then put it through the shredder. Then comes the most important question: what do you want to learn in its place?

Beyond the familiar: experience it for yourself at DDW

The projects in Designing Society reveal just how many choices lie behind the things we have come to take for granted. And that is exactly where space for change emerges: by asking different questions together, exploring other possibilities and trying out new ways of working. In short, by letting go of expectations.

Designing Society invites you to do the same. What expectations shape how you live, work, care for others and live together? Which ones would you be willing to let go of? Because what has been designed, can be redesigned.