Design

Designing for system change

Geopolitical tensions, pollution and other climate problems, scarcity of raw materials are still major global themes that designers are confronted with. Other urgent topics are poverty, loneliness, inequality, violence, death and polarization – from global to individual level (see for example Dutch Design Foundation 2023, Bijl 2025 and Arnolds 2024). Designers are focusing more on jointly designing a better future, which was noticeable during the Dutch Design Week 2024 (DDW24) and during Graduation Shows at various academies. Last year, gender shifted as a 'hot topic' in these exhibitions, towards the 'female gaze' (see paragraph 'Female gaze'). Bicultural perspectives, underexposed subjects and untold stories in areas such as (de)colonialism, racism and migration, also remain current topics. Artificial intelligence (AI) is maturing (Junte 2024), while at the same time it has acquired a stronger counterpart at the other end of the spectrum with the flourishing of the artisanal and analogue way of working (see paragraph 'Craft').

Dutch Design Foundation (DDF) describes on the website of the events it organizes Dutch Design Week (DDW) a number by 2025 missions en perspectives to describe the current design field. In this way, the event offers the opportunity to connect participating designers and their relevant audiences. In addition, these missions and perspectives show a momentum of the most important trends among designers (Dutch Design Week n.d.).

'Designing for system change' has been reflected in various forms at Dutch Design Week in recent years, which is a leading platform for trends and developments in the design sector. In 2022, the theme of DDW was 'Get Set', which called for concrete steps and action (Dutch Design Foundation 2022). In 2023, the theme was 'Picture This' – which looked at future scenarios and designers offered new perspectives to involve people in a process of change and to embrace new perspectives (Dutch Design Foundation 2023)

The theme of Dutch Design Week 2024 was: 'Real Unreal'. It invited designers to explore the complex challenges of our time and to ask what can be considered truth in a time when the rise of 'fake news' and AI populates the (online) world. Designers provide answers to questions such as: How do we navigate between the different realities that make up our world today? What is real and what is not, and where do all our very diverse perspectives come together? (Dutch Design Week 2024).
 
Platform What Design Can Do (WDCD) gives designers the opportunity to present world-improving innovative strategies and visions, including through design competitions. Winners receive guidance in implementing these concepts and/or scaling them up within their practice. The Make It Circular Challenge, an initiative of WDCD and Ikea Foundation, this year produced thirteen winners with promising innovations that aim for a restorative and regenerative future. They show the power of creativity: from seaweed packaging to Mujo en upcycling marketplaces to the Dutch company CoolBricks that makes recyclable and unfired bricks from local cow dung and soil that, for the time being in Uganda, is an affordable, clean, safe and scalable solution for people on low incomes.

Collaboration of design with other sectors

Given today's urgent global issues, a growing number of initiatives are joining forces to bring about necessary system changes, with the aim of gaining more impact and designing a better future.

Examples of this are initiatives in the field of climate and the raw materials transition, which are often initiated by Rijkswaterstaat, provinces and municipalities. For example, the Municipality of Terneuzen (in collaboration with Regio Deal North Sea Port District (NSPD) and the Province of Zeeland) asked a group of designers to design the cultural breeding ground Nesse to be set up in Terneuzen that deals with so-called 'forever chemicals',such as PFAS and lead. The underlying idea according to the initiators is not to polarize, but to let designers with their creative thinking power talk about the approach to problems and come up with solutions together (MaterialDistrict Utrecht 2025b). From this breeding ground, Marte Mei, for example, wants to start her project, supported by the Stimuleringsfonds Pfas/Flax reduce PFAS pollution. In the polluted garden of this breeding ground, she will grow flax, harvest it and develop products with it.
 
What if Lab (part of Dutch Design Foundation) works as a matchmaker and facilitator on long-term, sustainable partnerships between design studios and organizations, such as Fokker Elmo en Leolux, in designing solutions to social problems. So help designers ProRail in the goal of having all NS stations in the Netherlands designed circularly by 2050. Or Vattenfall, which will start the project 'Upcycled Turbines' challenged designers to come up with new applications for wind turbines that have reached the end of their lifespan. Designers came up with surprising solutions by approaching waste as new resources, such as locally produced 'tiny houses' or floating houses as a solution to the housing shortage.

Regenerative design

Regenerative design is working towards a healthy and liveable environment, in which humans become part of the earth's ecosystems, so that natural resources are ultimately strengthened instead of depleted through a cycle (Material District Utrecht 2025b). This goes a step further than sustainability and devising biobased and circular products and systems.

An increasing number of young talents see it as a moral and ethical obligation to work as designers for a better future for people and the planet and opt for regenerative issues, as can be seen, for example, in the catalogue of the Design Academy Graduation Show 2024This is also evident from the subsidy applications for the Design scheme of the Creative Industries Stimulation Fund: more and more projects are about regenerative design and more specifically about material research and making the entire design chain more sustainable, as emerged from discussions with the Stimulation Fund.

While Material District Utrecht 2025, a platform where the latest developments in innovative, sustainable, biobased, circular and regenerative materials are exhibited in breadth, this approach was also clearly visible. Among other things, new building materials from food waste such as eggshells, coffee grounds, cocoa, cherry and date stones and walnut shells, but also wool, felt and mycelium were exhibited as promising materials in projects for healthy (interior) products (Material District 2025a, 2025b).

Forging chains is important for scaling up and commercializing biobased, circular and regenerative materials. The scale of these movements is growing significantly, as is evident from discussions with the sector about the many initiatives that designers are part of in the desire to realize sustainable system changes. They develop value chains as a model for new economic systems and to make the raw materials transition from a linear to a circular economy.

For example, Leonne Cuppen worked as one of the initiators and advisors on the regenerative project New Zwanenburg together with thirty students from Design Academy Eindhoven. The 17th-century farm and creative workplace with ten hectares of land just outside Eindhoven, served as a research laboratory to grow and develop crops such as hemp, sun crown and elephant grass for use as biobased materials in soil, road and hydraulic engineering. Designers, entrepreneurs, farmers, educational and (semi) government institutions worked together on this. The results of the project on regenerative agriculture were presented last year during DDW (Dutch Design Daily 2024).

Larger parties are also involved, such as Rijkswaterstaat and the independent non-profit organization Building Balance, which together with various ministries and provinces implements the National Approach to Biobased Construction (NABB). It is aimed at initiating, stimulating and supporting chain collaborations between the agricultural sector, processors, construction and governments and also puts the inhibiting regulations on the agenda.

Design research

The previous cabinet reserved nine million euros for 'design research' (Stimulation Fund 2022), thereby underlining that designers can make important contributions to social problems such as the housing shortage, loneliness, poverty, climate change and the nitrogen crisis (Junte 2024). Design research is a way of designing in which the (social) designer even more than before is a team player and searches for the best solution while doing. It results in collaborations between designers and policy makers, the police or professionals in healthcare where the designer's important contribution consists of making creative system analyses and an out-of-the-box approach to arrive at innovative solutions for difficult issues (Ibid.)

To streamline this method, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has Public Design Practice Program (PONT) launched, which is being implemented by the Dutch Design Foundation. Several pilots have already been successfully completed, such as the project by the Department of Extraordinary Affairs and the Ministry of Social Affairs to provide citizens with a 'low performance' to assist with (healthcare) allowances. Designers in Arnhem have been matched with energy network supplier Alliander to come up with practical creative concepts for the energy transition, including Rosalie Apituley. Design studio Ink Social Design developed the program Construction Box for ABN-Amro staff to introduce paternity leave as a new standard. DDF will further roll out PONT over the next three years in the form of lectures, workshops and case studies (Junte 2024).

While social design gained increasing social support a few years ago (Dijksterhuis 2020), it has now become an established form of design and is developing rapidly... Thus the Raad voor Cultuur in 2023 the design power of 'design thinking' in order to feed her advice for the revision of the cultural system (Raad voor Cultuur 2023). Social design was treated as a full-fledged discipline within the Creative Industries Stimulation Fund within the Design scheme, but for the 2025-2028 cultural plan period it is described more as a broad movement within the various disciplines in the creative industry (Stimulation Fund 2024). Within the fund there are advisors who specifically focus on social design subsidy applications.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in daily life and professional environments for quite some time. After a cautious introduction between humans and AI, a relationship followed in which, in addition to enthusiasm, doubt also began to play a role. The limitations of generative AI began to become clear, with image generators in particular showing their errors and biased, 'normative' side: for example, they generate a hand with six fingers, or a CEO or astronaut is always a white man (Junte 2024).

Within the design domain, an advanced and more equal relationship between humans and AI is slowly emerging, as can be read in the Dutch Designers Yearbook '24-'25 (Junte 2024, 84). Instruments such as ChatGPT, Midjourney and Gemini are used more sparingly, and digital designers do not let their images be created through but with Midjourney or Dall-E. Promptsand image editing are becoming standalone skills that are increasingly valuable for designers to possess. An important aspect of this development is increasing knowledge about how AI works and what its limitations are. Better Images of AI shows that awareness seems to be heading in the right direction: this database of free images focuses on realistic, ethical and non-stereotypical image generation. In doing so, they provide insight into the complex impact and functioning of AI (Ibid.).

An example of a project that questions the relationship between humans and AI is Poetics of Prompting, which was also part of the DDW '24 exhibition. In this project, MU Hybrid Arthouse and The Hmmm explore the new languages ​​that emerge from and around the collaboration between AI and human creativity, or: the relationship between prompting and poetry. In this, they question what it means to speak the language of the tool well, and how you can find ways to talk to the machines, instead of like a machine. For example, is it possible to get a different response if the language used for the prompt takes a more creative or poetic form?

Navigating and deploying AI is therefore a new competence that designers need. This also shows that Future of Jobs Report 2025 of the World Economic Forum see that AI and 'big data' are seen worldwide as the fastest growing skill for the next five years. AI clearly has added value, according to discussion partners from the sector. There are more data and tools available to test concepts, software can be developed faster and easier, processes can be automated and AI can also be used creatively to create 'new' images.

There are still plenty of question marks about AI. What are the consequences for the labor market for designers? Is the use of AI ethically responsible, and where does ownership lie when AI is involved in a process? How do we deal with this and how do we assess it? One concern is that AI is fed and trained by existing, mostly normative information that is online and therefore biased, biased. It is precisely important that information from different marginalized social structures – which is often not found online and is close to nature and traditions – is included in this system (What Design Can Do Live 2024).

The BNO conducted a survey among its members in 2022 and asked them for their opinions and experiences with AI. The questionnaire was completed by 67 design agencies and 145 independent designers in the Netherlands. The figures below show the results.

Female gaze

Gender (in)equality, diversity, inclusion and equality are still important themes within the design domain. The role of women in design remains a topic that designers specifically bring to attention. This is also noted by the Stimuleringsfonds, where a clear increase in applications for projects with a feminist perspective was noted within the Design scheme in 2024 (Bijl 2024).

Within this movement, designers ridicule the male gazebo and address topics such as feminism, femicide and misogyny, as an antidote to the dominant male perspective (Junte 2024, 90). In addition, they design solutions for problems that only women face and they know how to put underexposed taboo subjects in the spotlight. An example of this is Nienke Helder, who specializes in female sexuality, including her project Sexual Healing. Femicide is addressed by designers such as Rachelle Jeuring en Stephanie Charis Bakker. And Anna Aagaard Jensen, who plays with traditional role patterns and prejudices about gender and manspreading, is the first radical feminist designer with a solo exhibition in a national museum (the Centraal Museum Utrecht) (Junte 2024b).

There are many more examples: the Professional Organization of Dutch Designers (BNO) placed portraits of female designers online under the heading 'Female Gaze', Warehouse de Zwijger started with FemCity an intersectional feminist platform that advocates gender equality, and in the Design Museum Den Bosch you can see the exhibition Women as technology discover four equally important and problematic roles that women (can) play: women as homemakers, calculators, incubators and lust machines (Design Museum Den Bosch 2025).

Female designers are on average overrepresented at the various design academies, but are subsequently underrepresented in the professional field and at exhibitions in museums and galleriesThe figures below show the number of female alumni in the bachelor's programs Visual arts & Design, and Design or Form. In 2023, 66 percent and 70 percent of the alumni of these programs were women, respectively. If we then look at figures from the Collective Selfie 5 regarding the number of women working in the labour market in various visual and design professions, a different ratio emerges. In 2023, 45 percent of graphic designers and product designers were women, and 58 percent of visual artists were women. It is difficult to determine in which professional group designers ultimately work: not all graduates of the above-mentioned programmes who ultimately work in their field will be registered in the labour market in the aforementioned professional groups. Nevertheless, even if we look at the average of the other professional groups for comparison, the percentage of working women in the labour market is always lower than the percentage of women who graduated.

Crafts

Perhaps as a counterpart to AI, and even to the computer, there are a remarkable number of handcrafted (interior) designs with a literal fingerprint of the maker. The Graduation Shows of various academies and fairs as Object Rotterdam (2025), made it clear that the artisanal, analogue way of working is flourishing.

It seems to be a striking trend that the makers want to have everything in their own hands. They also design their own tools and creative machines in order not to be dependent on, for example, producers and distributors. At the DAE (Design Academy Eindhoven), designers Kiki & Joost have the Studio Thinking Hands set up, a study program that design students can follow, where no computer is used in the design process. This study program strengthens the desire for and responds to craftsmanship.

Crafts are also becoming an increasingly strong part of all other design education. Students are encouraged to learn crafts themselves, or work together with craftspeople in their design process. This was also emphasized in conversations with makers/designers, who further explained that craftsmen are often less visible because they work little with a gallery or public institution and often sell their work on the internet. Furthermore, the Creative Industries Stimulation Fund has launched the 'Open Call Contemporary use of crafts', with which the fund aims to strengthen equal cooperation between designers and craft practitioners with a view to a sustainable future of crafts (Stimuleringsfonds 2023).

The Stimuleringsfonds has noted that a remarkable number of projects in the applications for the Design 2025 scheme return to craftsmanship, as was evident from discussions with the fund. Applicants do this both to bring 'slowness' back into the design process and to return more to the core of certain craft technologies and methodologies. This is often accompanied by broader research into, for example, one's own family history or migration background in relation to specific forms of cultural heritage and craftsmanship. An example of this is the project 'Between threads and woven stories' by Weaving studio Leatemia, a multidisciplinary cultural project aimed at creating, discussing, reinterpreting, renewing and presenting the craft and cultural heritage of Ikat together with participants.

Fair pay and fair practice

Fair pay and fair practice are not always an issue in the professional group of designers and designers, just like in many other creative professional groups. A large number of designers are self-employed, others are employed by a design agency, and a third group works as an employee in companies, (semi-)public organizations or social organizations where design is not the main activity. In all these different constructions of the profession, the question arises as to what a fair and appropriate reward is for designers (Arnoldus et al. 2022). The government, for example, has also ARVODI (General Government Purchasing Conditions for Services) not properly aligned with the profession . Platform ACCT (Labor Market Cultural and Creative Future) is committed to designers by, for example, helping the sector with a publication on rate structure. Fair pay remains an urgent issue that requires attention in the design sector.