Dutch Design Week (DDW) is a design-focused international event in Eindhoven. Spread across some 100 venues throughout the city, the events include exhibitions, lectures, award ceremonies, networking events, debates and festivities. Every year, special attention is paid to the work and development of young talent. We visited this year’s edition to capture the work of WdKA students and alumni. Below you can read more about four projects, made by WdKA / PZI graduates, that we visited during the Dutch Design Week 2024.
You Are The Product by Jeroen Icks (Advertising & Beyond graduate)
This project explores how our behavior and lifestyles in a capitalist world alienate us from nature and ourselves. In this absurd reality in which humans are both perpetrators and victims, it criticizes consumer behavior and the fear-driven society dominated by media and social networks.
The artwork ‘You Are the Product’ lies at the intersection of art and advertising: "From the art world’s perspective, the project can be seen as a provocative piece that solely questions the factual digital human trafficking. From the advertising world, this advertisement, when promoted within the context of social media and the internet, can be used by governments, for example, to draw attention to the fact that we all need to be more conscious about our private data", says Jeroen.
You Are The Product is nominated for the Manifestations Young Talent Award 2024 and is presented at the Manifestation exhibition in the Veemgebouw at DDW.
MAI by Maraya Ivanova (Graphic Design graduate)
MAI is an interactive installation that shows how much drinking water AI uses. Visitors can ask MAI a question, that will be answered. Visitors will then also receive information about the amount of water that data centers use for the answer and see how the water tan fill up. With this project, Maraya wants to draw attention to the hidden impact of Artificial intelligence: "A lot of artists use ChatGPT, DALL-E and other generators either out of curiosity, or to help themselves with work, however most of them do not question what is their impact with their usage, which unfortunately leads to the usage of a lot of resources. As we immerse ourselves in the seemingly boundless capabilities of AI and chatbots, it becomes imperative to critically examine the ecological footprint, part of this digital evolution."
MAI is nominated for the Manifestations Young Talent Award 2024 and is presented at the Manifestation exhibition in the Veemgebouw at DDW.
Generated.Earth by Wouter Oomen (Advertising & Beyond graduate)
How do new AI tools (DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) see the physical world? This question led to large geographical maps made up of tens of thousands of AI-generated images, where the AI was asked to generating an image of a specific area.
Generated.Earth is Wouter's graduation project, that includes a map of Europe and Africa through the eyes of AI. The maps show how AI-generated images consist of the most used photos that can be found online about a topic. This provides unexpected results: Normandy looks like D-Day, the Red Sea looks like an underwater paradise and North-West England is a photo of the daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
These locations together form an expedition to learn about how AI sees the world. Each location reveals something about how AI depends on training data and how this data is processed and collected. It offers visitors to Generated.Earth a critical perspective on the images AI generates, which is crucial to remain clear-headed in a future where AI dominates our media.
Generated.Earth is nominated for the Manifestations Young Talent Award 2024 and is presented at the Manifestation exhibition in the Veemgebouw at DDW.
WadJas by Jasmijn Vermeulen (Master Design graduate at Piet Zwart Institute)
Jasmijn Vermeulen designed this jacket as part of her graduation project in collaboration with Hous of Design. The 'Wadjas' is the perfect linen, plastic free jacket for exploring the Wadden. A jacket for outdoor adventrues, ideal for cycling, hiking and experiencing the islands in all kinds of weather. At DDW, the prototypes of the jackets are presented for the public, who can help develop it further by writing their feedback on a label and pin it to the jackets.
The design is part of the 'Wad van Waarde' exposition at the Dutch Design Week in the Microlab Hall, that focuses on designing a system change to spark a sustainable transformation into a biobased economy that nurtures both nature and people. More info can be found on this website.
