At a glance
Nine days when Eindhoven becomes a city-sized laboratory for the ideas, materials and experiments that may shape how we live next.
Why go
You'll see
Experimental design · Social design · Product design · Digital design · Sustainable design · Bio-design · Fashion · Architecture · Material research
Pace of visit
Minimum: one full day. Ideally: two or three days.
Don't miss
Design Academy Eindhoven graduates: Often the festival’s most adventurous section, presenting designers before their ideas have been absorbed by the industry.
Strijp-S and Klokgebouw: Large-scale presentations in Eindhoven’s former industrial district, combining experimental studios with more established design organisations.
Sectie-C: A working creative area where studios, workshops and production spaces become part of the experience.
Material experiments: Look for projects that move beyond sustainability as a slogan and demonstrate how an alternative material is grown, assembled, repaired or reused.
Artlovers Tip
Worth a special trip.
Dutch Design Week is one of Europe’s most stimulating design events because it prioritises questions over perfect products. It offers a glimpse of what designers are testing now—and what may enter everyday life several years later.
Choose two geographical clusters per day and save individual projects before arriving. Begin with the most experimental work while your attention is fresh; large commercial presentations can wait until later.
Inside the exhibition
Dutch Design Week showcases work and concepts from 2,500 designers to 350,000 visitors across approximately 100 locations throughout the city.
Dutch Design Week transforms Eindhoven into a network of exhibitions, studios, industrial buildings and temporary interventions. Its geography is inseparable from its identity: the city’s history of technological manufacturing provides an unusually appropriate setting for designers concerned with production, materials and reinvention.
For 2026, R.A.W. — Rebel Authentic Worth celebrates the unfinished and experimental. The theme presents design as an investigative process capable of disrupting inherited assumptions, exposing uncomfortable realities and proposing alternative possibilities.
The programme spans almost every contemporary design discipline. Objects and furniture remain important, but DDW increasingly examines larger systems: how cities function, how resources are distributed, how technology affects behaviour and how design might respond to environmental and social pressure.
Unlike a conventional fair, it is not primarily about discovering what is ready to buy. Dutch Design Week is about encountering ideas at the moment they are being questioned, tested and sometimes completely rethought.
Worth travelling for?
Dutch Design Week is where you see design before it becomes polished, commercial or predictable. Graduate projects, speculative prototypes and material experiments appear alongside established studios and major design brands.
The 2026 theme, R.A.W., turns attention toward unfinished thinking, authentic experimentation and design capable of challenging established systems. Visitors encounter not only completed objects but also failures, early models and projects still evolving.
Dutch Design Week
Admission
Artlovers relevance
Plan your visit
Eindhoven, The Netherlands