Eindhoven will soon turn into a city shaped by ideas. Its industrial buildings, museum halls and public squares will open to the world as Dutch Design Week 2025 runs from October 18 - 26, 2025 as a celebration that marks twenty-five years of The Netherlands’ most influential design festival. The anniversary theme, Past. Present. Possible., looks both backwards and forward, tracing the evolution of design from object-making to social imagination. Over nine days, more than 2,500 designers, studios and brands will take over 120 venues, filling the city with experiments, encounters and conversations that suggest how design might shape the next chapter.

True to its experimental spirit, this edition of the Dutch Design Week is anticipated to look less like an exhibition of realised projects and more like a city in progress. The theme Past. Present. Possible. will act as a prompt to explore design’s capacity to move between reflection and action, memory and speculation. For Creative Head and co-founder Miriam van der Lubbe, the ambition is to let the world of design and its practitioners speak for itself.  “We create space for experimentation, bringing design to where people already are and inviting them to wander, discover and pause,” she says in the press release.

Van der Lubbe’s connection to Dutch design runs deep. Born in 1972, she studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven, the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. As co-founder of the studio Van Eijk & Van der Lubbe, she has built a multifaceted career spanning product design, spatial strategy and curatorial direction. Her practice is marked by a balance of aesthetics, social relevance and storytelling. Since 2022, as the creative head, she has guided the content and vision for Dutch Design Week, ensuring it remains both accessible and forward-looking.

At the Van Abbemuseum, Van der Lubbe will curate Bridging Minds, an ambitious exhibition presenting 100 works by some of the most recognised names in Dutch and international design. Among them will be Hella Jongerius, known for her sensitive approach to material and colour; Maarten Baas, whose playful reinventions of everyday objects blur the line between art and design; and Formafantasma, whose investigations into ecology and material ethics have reshaped global design discourse. The show will be arranged across 10 rooms, each devoted to a theme—from safety and care to empowerment and freedom. In one room, designer and biotechnologist Jalila Essaïdi and social innovator Bas Timmer will examine how design can offer dignity and protection in precarious conditions. In another, modernist pioneer László Moholy-Nagy and sound designer Ricky van Broekhoven will explore our evolving relationship with technology. Elsewhere, material innovators Alissa+Nienke and conceptual artist Dan Graham will address well-being through material and sensory experience. Together, these projects will frame design as a connective force—optimistic, critical and deeply human.

Beyond the museum, the city itself will become an open-air gallery through 11 public large-scale installations developed in collaboration with the Dutch Design Foundation and Bureau Binnenstad Eindhoven. Each will occupy a visible urban site, translating design ideas into shared encounters. Econario, created by environmental artist Thijs Biersteker, will visualise the environmental effects of political decisions through data-driven imagery, turning policy into a living landscape. Nearby, fashion-tech designer Pauline van Dongen will present The Umbra Pavilion—a flowing canopy made from her solar textile Heliotex. The piece of work will generate energy while offering shade by day and a soft, luminous presence by night—proposing a future where technology and the natural world seamlessly coexist.

Material experimentation will continue in Factory 5.0, a project by architect and researcher Aditya Mandlik. Here, 10,000 mealworms will slowly digest panels of polystyrene foam, reimagining construction as a living, regenerative process. The installation will question permanence and decay, leaving behind sculptural traces that suggest a circular, post-industrial future. In City at Sea Level, designer Bahar Orçun will immerse visitors in a partially submerged environment, confronting them with the realities of rising sea levels. The work will make the scale of the climate crisis feel immediate and bodily, rather than distant or abstract.

Some installations will focus on social experience. The Waiting Room, by Dutch designer Nanne Brouwer, will reconstruct a refugee reception tent using reclaimed bed frames from a Dutch asylum centre. Inside, recordings of residents will share personal reflections on displacement and belonging. The work will encourage empathy in a context often defined by statistics and policy. Where Brouwer’s  project prompts reflection through intimacy and testimony, The Institute for Sand Grain Elevation Policy (IZH), will take a lighter but no less pointed approach to civic engagement. Visitors will be invited to scatter bags of sand as part of a playful effort to “raise” the Netherlands—a commentary on soil subsidence and the impact of small, collective gestures.

Water will appear throughout the programme as both material and metaphor. Rain Café will turn a transparent rainwater tank into a public meeting point, visibly filling with each downpour while collecting water for daily use. Surrounded by benches and greenery, it will become a site for rest and conversation, reminding visitors that sustainability can also be social. In SONIC MAZE, a large inflatable labyrinth by mesure studio, known for its sensory spatial installations and ultimo intimo, a collective exploring intimacy and performance in public space; sound and movement will merge to encourage shared exploration in an age of digital isolation.

The Water Basin Totem, built from recycled construction materials and modelled on household water vessels from West Africa, will highlight questions of reuse and global inequality in access to resources. Ideas of making and collaboration will find tangible expression in TOUCHING CELLULOSE; the EduCrafting Pavilion developed by researchers and students from TU Delft and TH Köln. The installation will invite visitors to help construct a small bio-based pavilion using wood, hempcrete and cellulose. Combining traditional joinery with digital tools, it will offer a hands-on encounter with sustainable building methods and circular design principles.

The Design Week has always been a meeting ground for speculation and craft, a dialogue that continues at De Caai, a raw industrial complex in the former Campina dairy factory. Here, the exhibition Forward Furniture, curated by Belgian-born curator and cultural entrepreneur Liv Vaisberg, will transform a 2,000-square-metre hall into a stage for collectible and conceptual furniture. The showcase is an evolution of the initiative known as Future, Factory and Furniture—a collaboration between eight leading Dutch furniture and textile manufacturers like Arco, CS Rugs, Enschede Textielstad, Gelderland, Label Vandenberg, Lande Family, Lelux and Montis. Together, they have formed a collective that explores how the home and living sector can transition towards circular production models. The project places emphasis on material longevity, craftsmanship and supply chain collaboration, responding to the ecological challenges of mass-produced furniture. In Eindhoven, Forward Furniture will unfold through a curated presentation bringing together around 60 designers and brands, offering an international snapshot of how furniture design is rethinking production, quality and permanence. Set within one of the design festival’s busiest hubs, the show will demonstrate how experimentation, industry and sustainability can align without losing aesthetic rigour.

Emerging talent will once again take a central role through the Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show at Microstad, the academy’s new exhibition hub located in the former Campina factory complex. More than 200 graduating Bachelor’s and Master’s students will present projects that respond to the realities of 2025—from environmental shifts to the influence of artificial intelligence building on the inventive approaches we highlighted in last year’s show. Their work will suggest not only what design education looks like today, but also how a new generation of thinkers and makers is redefining the relationship between creativity and responsibility.

As Dutch Design Week reaches its quarter-century, its significance lies in how it continues to evolve without losing its sense of curiosity. The event will not merely commemorate its past achievements but use them as material for what comes next. Across museums, factories and open streets, design will appear as a conversation in motion, questioning, connecting and constantly remaking itself within the changing rhythms of the world.