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The Creative Voices of Dutch Design Week

18 October 2023

© Afonso de Matos - "Who can afford to be critical? - Design Academy Graduation Show 2022 - DDW22 - about.today
Five 'Creative Voices' have been selected to reflect and shed light on Dutch Design Week's (DDW) programme narratives from their own, unique perspectives. Through an Open Call, international creatives were invited to reflect on current issues and the role that designers can play in them.

Longreads, installations, visual columns: the Creative Voices have artistic freedom to choose the form of their reflections as long as they reflect DDW's programme narratives. The Creative Voice were presented on DesignDigger. Curious to know who they are?

© James Dyer & Nick Deakin

Nick Deakin x James Dyer

James Dyer is a lecturer in the school of Art and Design at Prague City University. He writes eclectically about design and communication. Nick Deakin is a graphic designer and illustrator who works under the studio moniker Totally Okay and is senior lecturer of Graphic Design at Leeds Arts University.

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"In speculative design, there is no “straight forward” movement – instead what is going on is more like a modest lyrical flocking, a sort of revolving dance of designers."

Nick Deakin

© Linsey Rendell

Linsey Rendell

Linsey Rendell is an Australian writer and editor living in London. Research and reading are central to her practice, as are conversations — with architects, designers, creatives, farmers and disruptors imagining possible futures shaped by decolonial feminisms, economies of care, radical urbanism, and Indigenous sovereignty. A future where nature has rights, community is a practice, and the story of how we live is a story of land and water.

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"A look through Dutch Design Week’s 2023 programme reveals winding and elastic ways of listening and learning that rethink stubborn constructs, experiment with alternative trajectories, and practise these design futures in the open."

Linsey Rendell

© Marcos Kueh - TextielMuseum - Patty van den Elshout

Marcos Kueh

Marcos Kueh is a textile artist with a background in graphic design and advertising. Growing up in a post-colonial developing country, he has always been fascinated about his identity as a Malaysian and his place in the larger discourses in the West. His practice is about safeguarding contemporary legends onto textiles; to use fibres to string together day-to-day narratives he encounters for storytelling - just as his ancestors in Borneo did with their dreams and legends, before the arrival of written alphabets from the West.

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"Even the innocent act of taking a snapshot is a microsecond, complex decision-making process of what we choose to include and exclude in the limited capacity of a frame."

Marcos Kueh

© Teun the Racoon - Bruno Baietto

Teun the Racoon

Teun is a critical designer and researcher based in the Netherlands. Its work unfolds in the space between the binaries of the biological and the manmade. Through an auto-ethnographic perspective, Teun explores and unveils the biopolitical layers that construct our designed surroundings. Teun’s work ranges from performance to upcycled objects and installations. Teun the Racoon is created by Bruno Baietto.

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"As a raccoon I don’t know where I come from but as a designer I know where I’m heading."

Teun the Racoon

© Lieke van Stekelenburg

Lieke van Stekelenburg

Lieke van Stekelenburg is the founder of coaching company Consense. She coaches professionals, managers and directors to achieve improvements in their lives and careers. In addition, she teaches young professionals in applied psychology at Fontys University of Applied Sciences. Lieke studied Theology and Ethics (cum laude) at Tilburg University and is completing a PhD at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam researching what it means to equip (young) professionals with an ethical compass.

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"As designers purposefully shape and provoke transformation in society, they bear a moral responsibility and to do ‘good work’."

Lieke van Stekelenburg