Design Academy Eindhoven, Social Design MA

Projects 2023

The Mediterranean Sponge as a Menstrual Product

Boram Koh, Emma Bereau, Manami Taniuchi, Sophia Kukuwitakis

A Mediterranean sea sponge is grown in the house and fashioned as a reusable tampon. At the end of its life cycle the tampon can be decomposed in soil.

Maartje Dros (right) and Eric Klarenbeek (left) are a designer duo that combines social design with technology. Their aim is to challenge and explore the use of space by connecting history, crafts and new technologies in archetypical objects to invite and evoke new use of space. Eric Klarenbeek graduated in 2003 at DAE. Since then he has designed for clients such as Droog Design, Marcel Wanders's Moooi, Lidewij Edelkoort, Makkink Bey, Eneco and the Ministry of the Netherlands. He is founder of the ArTechLab at the AKI ArtEZ art academy. His projects have been exhibited and published extensively.

Maartje Dros, also a graduate of DAE, acts on the use and dynamics on the periphery of space and borders. It forms the base of her work that explores possibilities on use of space and our common grounds. The outcomes requests collaboration between user and space rather than it is giving stage to a sole object. Not only the hardware of a city is being questioned and integrated her designs, the physical outcome can be seen as an expression of social structures.

Dros and Klarenbeek are both tutors at the Social Design MA at DAE and run the BioLab at the school.

Marina Otero Verzier is Head of the Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven. The program focuses on new roles for designers attuned to contemporary ecological and social challenges. From 2015 to 2022, she was the Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), the Dutch Institute for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture. At HNI, she led initiatives focused on labor, extraction, and mental health from an architectural and post-anthropocentric perspective. Previously, Marina was Director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, Columbia University GSAPP. She has been a co-curator at the Shanghai Art Biennial 2021, curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, and chief curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. She has co-edited Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021) More-than-Human (2020), Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016-20), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), and After Belonging (2016), among others.