Kruisstraat Design District

Kruisstraat Design District returns to the Woensel neighbourhood of Eindhoven, presenting an exhibition in two parts during Dutch Design Week 2026. The first, Essential Interest, brings together recent graduates from design schools around the Netherlands. For each participating designer who requires it, Stichting Sjwa - the organising institution - issues a formal letter of cultural interest as part of their visa application process. The exhibition begins, in other words, before it opens. The work on show is the outcome of a process that starts with a bureaucratic question: whose presence is considered of value to Dutch culture, and who decides? The second part, The Terminal, takes the economics of design practice as its subject. At its centre is a live display - a computer terminal - showing the real financial conditions of the room you are standing in: what each work cost to make, what each designer was paid to participate, what has sold and what the gap means in hourly rates. Works are available through multiple models simultaneously - solidarity pricing, fractional ownership, live crowdfunding of works not yet made. Visitors do not browse a showroom. They enter a live financial system and are asked to act within it consciously. Together the two parts ask the same question from different angles: what is Dutch design culture actually built for, and for whom? The district does not answer this. It holds the question open, in a neighbourhood where it is most grounded, with the people for whom it is most consequential.