At Dutch Design Week 2025 (18–26 October, Eindhoven), education meets experimentation. Across exhibitions and workshops, students, designers and researchers reimagine how we learn from materials — and from each other. From wool and clay to hair and hybrid fibres, their works celebrate curiosity as a driver of sustainable change.

Weaving the Future

The Swedish School of Textiles Graduation Exhibition – Fabric Form Future showcases the next generation of textile innovators. The graduates merge technology, craftsmanship, and sustainability through advanced weaving, knitting and printing. Their projects demonstrate how textiles can shape new relations between humans, nature and society. Material behaviour becomes a language for care, circularity, and emotional connection — showing that fabric is both structure and story.

Material as Memory and Ecology

Tracing by Hair by Yi Zhang transforms human hair into a sensory and symbolic material. Through a video installation and participatory workshops, the artist examines the ecological afterlife of hair — from landfill persistence to nitrogen pollution — while inviting visitors to handle and recycle hair into mats. The project challenges social norms about waste, hygiene, and emotional distance, reframing discarded matter as part of an interconnected urban ecosystem.

Rediscovering Natural Cycles

Wool: (Re)discovered by New Order of Fashion invites visitors to reconsider one of the oldest yet most undervalued materials. Through exhibitions, talks, and workshops, the programme uncovers the regenerative potential of wool — a fibre that is renewable, biodegradable, and deeply local. Designers collaborate with experts and artisans to revalue discarded Dutch wool, transforming it into a symbol of restoration and system change.

Craft as Critical Inquiry

In KeramiekCROSSOVER – Draaien met…, Guusje Beeftink challenges the perception of clay as a purely traditional material. By placing playful materials like polymer clay, silicone, and beeswax on the potter’s wheel, she blurs the boundaries between art, hobby, and science. The experiment questions what defines craftsmanship and artistic value in an era of speed and digital convenience.

Material as Memory and Connection

Through thefoundededit, Studio Samayam works with found craft objects from India, reconnecting contemporary design with ancestral skill and cultural storytelling. Meanwhile, in Tracing by Hair, Yi Zhang uses human hair as both material and metaphor, exploring its ecological afterlife and our emotional relationship with waste. These projects remind us that material innovation also requires empathy — for people, processes, and planetary systems.

Education as Transformation

Together, these exhibitions form a living classroom where material knowledge becomes a tool for social, cultural, and ecological transformation. From schools and labs to studios and workshops, the next generation of designers redefines making as a way of thinking — and learning as a lifelong dialogue with matter itself.

Source & photos: Dutch Design Week