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Photo by Boudewijn Bollmann
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Veenhuizen collaboration continues with fourth edition of Design Deal Koloniën van Weldadigheid

Veenhuizen collaboration continues with fourth edition of Design Deal Koloniën van Weldadigheid. Design Academy Eindhoven students will engage with the theme of landscape at the World Heritage site in Veenhuizen a unique experimental Dutch village and prison town.

In 2022, DAE signed the contract for the fourth edition of the Design Deal Koloniën van Weldadigheid – a partnership between the province of Drenthe, municipality of Noordenveld, PI Veenhuizen, KETTER&Co and Design Academy Eindhoven. The fourth edition also welcomes new partners in the Drents Archief, the Gevangenismuseum and the Nieuwe Rentmeester.

The new project will run from 2023 to 2025, with students, interns, alumni and a curator working in Veenhuizen, examining challenges presented by the landscape in and around Veenhuizen. Examples might include how to deal with energy in a protected, vulnerable environment, or how to manage and create new economic energy around empty monuments.

Veenhuizen was originally built in Drenthe, north Netherlands, in the 19th century as one of a series of Koloniën van Weldadigheid or 'Colonies of Benevolence' — a unique combination of agriculture, architecture and social engineering. They created a distinctive landscape, but the ideal proved unsustainable, and Veenhuizen later became a prison town.

In 2012, Irene Fortuyn, leader of Bachelor design studio Urgencies and artistic director of KETTER & Co, visited Veenhuizen and found a village full of stories, rich in nature, and home to a colourful collection of people, as well as still housing a functional prison. Her vision was to bring the practice of embedded design to the area.

Products that have emerged from previous editions of the Design Deal include a pen that writes with peat water and a bicycle that detainees in PI Veenhuizen can weld as the conclusion of their welding training as a step towards reintegration. Many of the projects were published in a 2021 book A Place to Stay: Practising embedded design

"After three previous successful deals, this fourth is a renewed and broadened design deal," said commissioner Nelleke Vedelaar. "Veenhuizen has now become a Unesco World Heritage Site as part of the Koloniën van Weldadigheid. In addition to the partners involved, the Drents Archive now also participates, with its enormous archive of and about the people who lived in the agricultural colonies for poverty alleviation. The National Prison Museum also participates, to show the results in exhibitions. Stichting de Nieuwe Rentmeester, the organisation that took over 80 national monuments from the National Property Administration in 2021 to facilitate even better experience, is also connected. In short, even more cooperation with partners in the region and more focus on sharing with the public."