Dutch Design Week and Design Week Mex­i­co are the high­lights of our fall show sea­son, with a full ros­ter of pro­gram­ming, from tem­po­rary instal­la­tions in spe­cial venues, to muse­um and gallery exhi­bi­tions. At Dutch Design Week, we wit­nessed an inten­si­fi­ca­tion of efforts in sus­tain­abil­i­ty. At Design Week Mex­i­co, an upbeat ambi­ence pre­vailed, with a focus on hybrid works by teams of Mex­i­can crafts­peo­ple and con­tem­po­rary design­ers. Here are a few notable projects spot­ted dur­ing our days explor­ing these cen­ters of creativity.

Through­out show venues — Design Acad­e­my Eind­hoven (DAE), Piet Hein Eek, Kaz­erne and Micro­lab — design­ers sought to raise aware­ness by turn­ing dis­card­ed mate­ri­als into func­tion­al design. In fact, the DAE Grad­u­a­tion Show took place in a shop­ping mall called ​“Heuv­el” which is 70% vacant, thus empha­siz­ing the urgent need for repur­pos­ing archi­tec­ture as well as mate­ri­als. Ila­ra Cagvaglia’s project, The Pop­ping Sound of Bub­ble Wrap, explored her fas­ci­na­tion with mate­r­i­al cul­ture and the neg­a­tive impacts of con­sump­tion. She used dis­card­ed bub­ble wrap as a mold­ing mate­r­i­al that yield­ed organ­ic and syn­thet­ic forms in earthy tones that call to mind desert landscapes.

Piet Hein Eek’s sig­na­ture works often fea­ture recy­cled wood, re-com­posed to cre­ate con­tem­po­rary fur­ni­ture. He lac­quers his fin­ished pieces with a high gloss coat­ing that trans­forms the reused wood of dis­parate fin­ish­es into high­ly desir­able assem­blage. Where Eek pre­served the diver­si­ty of ele­ments com­pos­ing his fur­ni­ture, Teun Zwets opt­ed for a homoge­nous high gloss paint to uni­fy the whole. Zwets reused dis­card­ed wood pro­files that he split with an axe and glued togeth­er to cre­ate one-of-a-kind, func­tion­al fur­ni­ture. Anoth­er recy­cler, Ilse Evers, founder of Ever­som, used dis­card­ed fire hoses to cre­ate hand­bags and out­door fur­ni­ture that have the look of lux­u­ri­ous brick red leather.

Per­haps the ulti­mate act of recy­cling on dis­play in Eind-hov­en was at Micro­lab: the Liv­ing Cof­fin. Grown from myceli­um and upcy­cled hemp by Loop Biotech, these biodegrad­able con­tain­ers return the body’s nutri­ents to the soil. Mean­while, at the Van Abbé Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, a cof­fin made from Ikea fur­ni­ture com­po­nents was on dis­play — a com­ment on the tem­po­ral nature of the body and con­sumer goods.

In Mex­i­co, we wit­nessed a cel­e­bra­tion of mate­ri­als and fab­ri­ca­tion tech­niques in vol­canic stone, woven leather, rat­tan and straw, clay, wood, wool and cot­ton. All of these mate­ri­als have been used since ancient times as build­ing mate­ri­als, func­tion­al and dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments. What was remark­able were the joy­ous part­ner­ships of for­mal­ly trained design­ers and arti­sans work­ing through-out the coun­try on ambi­tious projects that pro­pel both sets of pro­fes­sion­als forward. 

The cir­cle was a key motif. Ceram­ics were shaped, round medal­lions dec­o­rat­ed build­ings, and col­or­ful dots of all shapes and sizes were sewn onto fab­ric, bring­ing a play­ful touch to house­wares and tapes­tries. One of the most impres­sive cir­cu­lar forms was Per­petuo by artist Sebastián Ánge­les at ​“Vision y Tradi­cion”, an exhi­bi­tion mount­ed at the Museo Nacional de Antropoli­gia. To cre­ate the eight-foot-tall wick­er sculp­ture, Ánge­les col­lab­o­rat­ed with Martín Cruz — a weaver at Arte­sanías Clari­ta, a work­shop in Teq­ui­squia­pan. By refin­ing var­i­ous process­es, he was able to trans­late tech­niques reserved for craft­ing small bas­kets to larg­er-scale work. This sym­bol of in-per­pe­tu­ity took more than a month and a half to complete. 

Soft geo­met­rics were also in abun­dance at the Design House in the capital’s Lomas neigh­bor­hood, where we also enjoyed a crash course in con­tem­po­rary Mex­i­can col­or. Rooms bathed in ter­ra cot­ta and sien­na alter­nat­ed with spaces washed in cool neu­tral pig­ments. The Design House was a show­case for inte­ri­or design, fur­ni­ture and fin­ish­es — dis­played in six­teen inte­ri­or and five exte­ri­or spaces. 

The sculp­tur­al ground floor ter­race, by Mood Estu­dio, was paint­ed a rich clay col­or that com­ple­ment­ed the ver­dant hues of the sur­round­ing foliage. Tadeo Lopez Toledano, archi­tect and founder of the firm, describes his vision for the ter­race as a thread between past and present, with an under­stand­ing that our new way of liv­ing is seam­less. The ter­race is a space for recre­ation, and now blends indoors and out. The ochre shades were the visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of nature and man-made struc­tures exist­ing side by side.

The exhi­bi­tions at Dutch Design Week and Design Week Mex­i­co show that despite glob­al­iza­tion, design is extreme­ly diverse and deeply inflect­ed by its geo­graph­ic con­text and the lives of the peo­ple who cre­ate it. This breadth of design approach­es engen­ders a sim­i­lar­ly and vital­ly diverse set of approach­es to exis­ten­tial glob­al prob­lems. Both shows fea­tured design­ers engaged with the urgent ques­tion of sus­tain­abil­i­ty; those in Eind­hoven tend­ed to focus on recy­cla­bil­i­ty and con­tem­po­rary con­sumer cul­ture while Mex­i­can design­ers focused on inno­v­a­tive appli­ca­tions of nat­ur­al mate­ri­als and long-ven­er­at­ed craft tech­niques — look­ing to the past to design the future.