Design Academy Eindhoven can look back upon a successful 2012 Graduation Show. With around 28,000 visitors, including a record number of visitors on a single day – 4,875 on Friday 26 October – the annual show as once again a highlight of the Dutch Design Week.
From 20 - 28 October the academy’s graduate designers went to great lengths to tempt, inspire and entertain the public and the media under the watchful creative eye of curators Ryan Pescatore Frisk and Catelijne van Middelkoop (Strange Attractors Design).
This year’s show was characterised by a continuous and varied stream of visitors, with an average of 3,100 visitors a day, a mix of day trippers, entrepreneurs, professionals and journalists. The show featured a high level of interaction because the highly motivated exhibitors were there every day to explain their designs to the very interested audience. And the graduation projects were picked up by the international media plus a range of players in the design field, which resulted in awards that could be won, such as the DOEN | Materiaalprijs, the Social Design Talent Award, the Eindhovens Dagblad reader’s choice awards, the Design Indaba invitation and the Keep an Eye Grants.
In addition to the trademark events during the show, such as the ‘Friends of the Academy’ breakfast and the Alumni Homecoming, this edition of the Graduation Show also featured some new initiatives such as a series of daily, exhibition-related lectures and debates with graduates at the restaurant, special design tours, the ‘Friends of the Academy’ exhibition, the CRISP* conference and an edition of the Design Debates at the Designhuis. Furthermore, the curators initiated the addition of QR codes to every graduation project, and opened up online access to the work with a dynamic project database**.
Design Academy Eindhoven can look back on a successful show from a range of perspectives. The 2012 Graduation Show underlines the recognition our graduates deserve, the importance of Dutch Design Week, and the collaboration between all the actors in the design world in and around Eindhoven.
*)CRISP: Creative Industry Scientific Programme
**) database projects: http://www.designacademy.nl/portals/0/www/events/daegs12/