Graduates of INSIDE and Master Industrial Design at Dutch Design Week

The graduates are participating in the exhibition 'Class of 26 + the Avenue Of Fresh Perspectives'. This is an annual group exhibition in which various Dutch and international design schools present their most impressive graduation projects at DDW. This annual exhibition highlights the importance of education and puts the next generation of designers in the spotlight before a wide audience, with the goal of reflecting each individual school’s story through the current theme of Dutch Design Week: Past, Present, Possible.

Participating students: Riekje Paruschke, Stella Kechagioglou, Pien Bruins Slot, Linnis van Kampen

Riekje Marie Paruschke - Rerooting Forward: Designing for Death Beyond Fast Furniture

What is your project about?
Rerooting Forward explores how furniture might be rethought as something embedded within ecological relationships rather than as a static commodity detached from the landscapes and bodies that bring it into being. Today, a piece of furniture often arrives as a finished, standardised object, with the ecological processes behind its materials largely made invisible. In response to climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion, the project explores how furniture can reconnect us with the living systems and material cycles that sustain us.

Why are you making this project?
The project asks how design might move beyond an extractive relationship with materials and instead work with existing ecological cycles. I am interested in what happens when furniture is grown from local biological resources and when growth, transformation and material agency become part of the design process. Rather than seeing ourselves as separate from these processes, Rerooting Forward proposes furniture as a way of reembedding ourselves within the shared ecological cycles we are already part of.

Can you tell something about the materials you are working with?
The furniture is grown from local surplus streams in The Hague. Leaves, branches and wood chips collected through municipal tree maintenance and landscape management are combined with hemp substrate and fungal mycelium. Materials that are often treated as waste are instead understood as part of an existing local resource cycle. Through fungal growth, these materials are transformed into new material bodies. The resulting furniture carries traces of the landscape and conditions from which it emerged, and is fully biodegradable, allowing it to eventually return to the soil.

Stella Kechagioglou - Here for the Susu

What is your project about?
The project is about susu, a Greek word connected to gossip, pop culture and “the tea”: the informal exchange of stories, information and things happening around us.

Here for the Susu is a situated research project developed within the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. It looks at how everyday and informal forms of being together can create spaces of intimacy, safety and community within an institution.

The academy is inhabited by people from many different communities and cultural backgrounds. I am interested in how these groups meet and form relationships, and in how common space can emerge through very ordinary acts: sitting together, eating, talking, gossiping, making things and simply spending time with one another.

Why are you making this project, and what is its goal?
Gossip is extremely ordinary and almost unavoidable. We gather, exchange stories and information, and talk about what is happening around us. I am interested in taking something that can appear insignificant and recognising its social and spatial importance.

These informal exchanges can create trust, intimacy and networks of care. They can temporarily transform a table, a corridor or an unused corner into a place where people feel they belong.

The idea of the commons is increasingly present in conversations around architecture, design, education and institutions. Yet there are still surprisingly few places where people can simply be together without having to consume something, produce something, attend an organised event or fulfil a specific institutional purpose.

Here for the Susu asks whether everyday rituals, gossiping, eating, drinking tea or sitting around a shared table, can become tools for creating commons from within an institution.

It also questions the role of the designer. Instead of designing a finished space for a community, can a designer create the conditions for people to recognise one another, participate, and gradually shape that space themselves?

Can you tell us something about the materials you work with?
My practice is less about one specific material and more about creating conditions for people to come together. Depending on the context, I work through food, music, painting, making and conversation to create possibilities for collective agency, inclusion and exchange.

Food often becomes a starting point. For me, the table is one of the simplest forms of social space: a place where conversations begin and where questions can move from something very personal to wider social or political issues.

The tablecloth has therefore become an important material in the project. During a susu, I invite people to use it, draw on it, write on it or leave traces behind. I then continue painting and drawing directly onto the fabric. Over time, it becomes a kind of living archive — holding gestures, conversations and moments that might otherwise disappear.

Reuse is equally important to my practice. I work as much as possible with existing, discarded or previously used materials. This is partly connected to sustainability, but I also think of reuse as a social strategy.

Used materials already carry histories. When someone encounters an object they recognise, there is already a certain familiarity. I am not asking people to learn a new visual language before they can participate. In this sense, reuse can also become a tool for inclusion: allowing a space to grow from materials that already belong to our shared everyday life.

Linnis van Kampen - WithIn the Spray Gun

WithIn the Spray Gun is a material study centered around the spray gun as a craft tool. The spray gun is usually understood as an industrial tool, designed for efficiency, repetition and control. In this project, I use it to explore a more sensitive relationship with ceramic glaze.

Through experiments with pressure, distance, movement, layering and stencils, I investigate how small changes influence the surface and lead to different material responses. The resulting tiles are not simply finished outcomes, but traces of testing, adjustment and discovery.

The project questions the separation between craft and industry. Rather than rejecting industrial techniques, WithIn the Spray Gun explores how an industrial tool can become part of a contemporary craft practice. I use the term ‘neo-craft’ to describe this approach: a practice that embraces contemporary and industrial tools not only to make something, but also as a way of understanding and learning from material.