What to See at Dutch Design Week 2026: Water, Materials and Three Emerging Talents
Running October 17–25 in Eindhoven, Dutch Design Week takes R.A.W. as its theme. A water-and-sound installation, research into bodies and materials, and reused industrial spaces expand the picture beyond a furniture fair.
Dutch Design Week 2026 runs October 17–25 in Eindhoven under the theme R.A.W., short for Rebel Authentic Worth, directing attention toward unpolished experiments, exploration and the creative process. This citywide design event extends beyond finished furniture to installations involving water and sound, material research and questions about the body. October 25 is the final day of this edition. For anyone organizing a visit, asking how a work operates and where its materials come from offers more than treating every location as a shopping list.
Water becomes a material for sound and performance
Everything Moist Seems Alive is a collaboration between MAISON the FAUX, MU Hybrid Art House, Studio Boris Acket and Dutch National Opera & Ballet. Inspired by Astrida Neimanis’s concept of hydrofeminism, it approaches the body as an open ecosystem connected to the planet’s water cycle. Water passes through tubes and membranes and gathers in pools, while its sounds intertwine with performers’ voices. Here, water does more than create attractive reflections: flow, leakage and relationships with the body become the substance of the work.
Installation photographs show a transparent water container alongside a rough base and video screens, placing liquid within a structure that can be observed. Sound and performance also prevent the installation from being only a fixed form: the same space can take on different rhythms at different moments. A useful approach is to identify the vessels holding water and the routes it takes before noticing how human voices enter the arrangement. This is one way of reading the installation, rather than a claim that every visitor will have the same sensory or emotional experience.
Everything Moist Seems Alive places a water container alongside a base and video imagery.
Three emerging talents ask different questions about bodies and materials
The Dutch Design Awards Emerging Talent Awards were presented on October 17 at the Piet Hein Eek workshop to Jun Fujisaku, Ori Orisun Merhav and Esmay Wagemans. Each received €10,000; that amount is an individual prize, not the combined total for all three. Their recognition draws attention to materials and methods. It should not be reduced to a student-project competition, as the winners have distinct lines of research within their own practices.
Dutch Design Awards activities unfold around a long table inside the workshop.
Fujisaku draws on architecture and cabinetmaking to develop adaptable furniture. Merhav investigates an insect-derived biomaterial, while Wagemans sculpts and casts directly against the body. These differences matter: adaptable domestic order, the production of biomaterials and new representations of the body are separate questions, rather than interchangeable examples of sustainable styling. Together, they move the assessment of design beyond visual novelty toward whether its methods and purposes can be clearly explained.
Industrial spaces, a graduation show and practical visiting details
Piet Hein Eek’s complex combines retail, display and dining functions and incorporates reclaimed elements from nearby older industrial buildings, extending reuse beyond individual products. Long tables, material displays and circulation routes in the photographs suggest how design participates in everyday activity. Elsewhere, Design Academy Eindhoven’s graduation show spans furniture and material experiments. The two offer useful points of comparison: a place that remains in use, and proposals that question what future uses might be.
A chair-shaped work in the Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show joins seat and back through a continuous bend.Material displays and a circulation route connect presentation with everyday use at Piet Hein Eek’s complex.
Entry conditions must be checked individually; one free project does not make the whole festival free. The official Everything Moist Seems Alive program page lists free admission at MU Hybrid Art House, Torenallee 40-06. On October 25, it opens from 11:00 to 18:00, with performances at 13:00, 14:15, 15:30 and 16:45, all Eindhoven local time. Those hours apply only to this project and this festival edition, rather than serving as common opening hours for other venues.
