SDL – Dutch Design Week ’14 Talks with designers about their vision

To develop my vision, I visited the Dutch Design Week (DDW). The past few years I always was overwhelmed by the number of products at DDW. After talking with my coach about this, I visited the exhibitions focusing on the ‘how’ of the designs rather than the ‘what’. My way to do that was to talk with the designers about their products and the vision that drives their work.

Designer Wouter Strietman^a told me that he believes in the importance of excellent quality and craftsmanship. That’s why he made a hand-operated espresso machine (figure 1) that gives full control on the process of making the perfect espresso. Design Academy Graduates Jelmer den Adel and Zeno Koenigs want to make abstract problems like climate change more accessible to a young audience, resulting in a game for mobile phones. Although they hadn’t any experience in developing apps, they chose this medium without any doubt: the message you want to communicate should be the reason to choose a medium like an app, or a book, and not the other way around.^b These talks have given me a lot of inspiration for the design projects I am involved in. It also helped me concretize the type of designer I want to be, which I tried to integrate in my vision.