This year, Dutch Design Awards (DDA) works with ten former winners or nominees in the Young Designers category. Each of them highlights one young designer and promising name in the current design field working on the same mission as themselves.
Femke Hoppenbrouwer
Young designer spotlighted by Manon van Hoekel
Dutch Design Awards 2024
Femke Hoppenbrouwer combines design and social practices to challenge stigmas in society. Her work subverts stereotypes and introduces alternative narratives to fixed patterns and ways of thinking. In her latest work, Het Scootmobiel Dans Collectief (The Mobility Scooter Dance Collective), she collaborates with a community of users of mobility scooters in the Netherlands to reframe the perception linked to these vehicles and its users, which often carry a social stigma rooted in ageism and ableism. Femke merges community collaboration with field-based research and artistic experimentation. Playing with the detailing that embodies larger topics, her work proposes new perspectives and reveals overlooked aspects of society.
Femke initiated Het Scootmobiel Dans Collectief, the first dance collective of people using a mobility scooter as an extension of their body. While these scooters are widely used in the Netherlands and enhance the quality of life for those with impaired mobility, they still face social stigma. The collective performs choreographed dances, amplifying the visibility of the mobility scooter community and aiming to destigmatise their use. They collectively explore and execute the routines in a vibrant example of the beauty and joy of the vehicles. An accompanying documentary reveals the behind-the-scenes story of the performance, showcasing the self-dependency, social connections, and joy within the collective. Femke’s work combines her expertise in visual design, art direction, and social engagement, addressing social issues with creativity and impact. She graduated with a Social Design Master from the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Manon van Hoeckel
Young Designer Dutch Design Awards 2018
Manon van Hoeckel designs encounters. Taking the daily lives of the target group as a starting point, she develops tools for social impact that offer new insights and encourage strangers to connect.
Her work often focuses on overlooked groups: undocumented refugees, women in prison, homeless youngsters, the elderly, and people in a home for the mentally disabled. Be it through interventions, programmes, or ideas, she brings people together while addressing the need for systemic change that goes beyond product solutions. Social design projects become a way through. Manon asks topical and relevant questions, in light of the disappearance of the conversation in public space, in politics and between different groups in our society. Through these designed encounters she formulates original solutions that reveal the transformative power of design in a natural way.
Since graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2014 with a mobile embassy for undocumented refugees, Manon continues creating interventions encouraging strangers to talk to each other. For ‘Boijmans wassalon’ (2017-2018), she placed a free and fully working launderette at the museum Boijmans van Beuningen entrance. With your dirty laundry as a free ticket to the museum, it questioned the museum’s role, inviting people from the neighbourhood who had never set foot in the museum before while offering a timeframe for unexpected conversations. Recently she worked on Bouwdepot: a trajectory aimed at building self-confidence and self-direction among homeless youth. By providing young people in a vulnerable position with a stable basis, they can start building a better future. In a project for Kleinkijkacademie Manon disguised herself as a window cleaner and engaged with residents with severe mental or multiple disabilities, turning the everyday care task into a creative opportunity to connect and interact.
Dutch Design Awards
Dutch Design Awards (DDA) has been a leader in interpreting Dutch design for years. DDA’s goal is broader than rewarding the best design: we want the conversation about Dutch design to continue. With great openness and curiosity, we therefore facilitate exchanges between designers and curators, public and professionals. In order to continue emphasising the essential impact of design on society and to contribute to the development of the profession.
