Graduation Show

The Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show is one of the world’s most influential exhibitions of work by new designers. Staged annually in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week, it allows both Bachelor and Master students to present their final projects to thousands of visitors in a curated environment.

The Graduation Show helps define and communicate the school’s agenda and stance on design. Bringing together work by over 180 graduates, the show reveals potential new futures, offers critiques on our current reality and engages with complex ideas about what design is, what it does and what it should do.

It is both a celebration of the students and an opportunity for the school and its graduates to engage with the wider world, inviting the design community and members of the public to visit and engage with the work on display.

Due to its scale and the quality and complexity of many of the projects presented, the exhibition rewards multiple visits. Over the decades, it has proven a rich resource for journalists and manufacturers hunting for new talent, as well as trend forecasters and design industry professionals, who view the exhibition as a unique opportunity to engage with new ideas. It is also an opportunity for prospective students to speak to graduates and understand more about DAE’s approach to design education.

Graduation show 2019, photos: Sjoerd Eijkmans

HISTORY

Historically, the DAE Graduate Show was staged in Amsterdam. In 2001, Li Edelkoort – then creative director of DAE – moved the exhibition back to the Academy building in Eindhoven when Dutch Design Week launched. DAE partnered with the Dutch Design Foundation, the organisation behind the design week, to help create an event that has become a key moment in the year for the design industry.

The Arena, a live talks platform occupying a space at the centre of the exhibition, was introduced in 2016. This has now become a regular feature, with a programme that gives audiences the chance to engage with students and well-known and respected industry figures, tackling some of the key issues raised by the work in the exhibition.

In 2018, under the leadership of DAE’s creative director Joseph Grima, the exhibition moved out of the Academy’s Witte Dame building to the former Campina milk factory space outside the city centre. This gave both the students and the curators of the exhibition more space to experiment with displaying their work. In 2019, Grima introduced a new curatorial structure for the exhibition, with projects gathered around themes, replacing the old system which saw work arranged under the title of each BA and MA programme.

‘The relevance of design today has vested us with a position in which we, as a profession, have unparalleled influence over our collective future,’ said creative director Joseph Grima, ‘Now it is down to us, as an institution, to extend the horizon of design education in response, questioning and revisiting how we present our work and generate discourse and debate.’