Welcome to the 2016 Graduation Ceremony. We warmly welcome all graduates, your families and supporters.
Today starts a new reality. After years in this institute you are stepping out into the real world. Each one of you more than deserves this diploma. You have earned it with your inquisitive minds, your daring spirit and with your fighter mentality.
Some of you conquered the next step in a very personal development. Some of you conquered a place in the design world. And some of you have even made an impact on the world at large. Each of you set difficult steps, moving up hill, to better yourself and to better your project. This school is very proud of you.
This new reality will be shaped by you because that is what designers do. You shape the future. You shape a new reality. Your projects are a part of this new reality. When you form clay, you transform reality. You transform reality into poetry, into magic.
Magic is what we see when we look at the silkworm project. Kumi Oda fell into a small panic when she unwittingly ended up with 1000 silk worm eggs. Overwhelmed she decided to raise the worms. They are so inbred – manipulated and perfected by breeding - that they have lost all the skills needed to survive in nature. Kumi’s poetic installation reveals an unnatural beauty – but actually it focuses on the lives that exist behind the making of products.
It is this same sensitivity Isabelle Mager brings to the surface when she researches hidden traces of human touch inside our high-tech gadgets. There she finds small pieces of tape that bear witness to the tedious work many people have to do inside this industry.
Big industry is challenged in many projects. In your search for new production methods, you are looking for innovations in material, but also looking for innovations that can benefit mankind or our planet. By mixing craft and technology, new products can be made on a more human scale.
Wendy Andreu has developed a new craft and in the process rethought the whole production of how her waterproof fabrics can be made. Her objects are formed from coiling rope in 3 dimensions. She has achieved so much on many levels in one project.
Fabien Briels has also rethought the production of garments by pouring silicon into a laser cut grid that cools into a magically translucent textile.
What is most impressive about today’s work is how it shows where the design discipline is heading. We see a lot of overlap in the subjects you are responding to and a lot of the scenarios you are predicting. Together you have identified issues that need to be urgently discussed. Together as a new generation, but also together with your teachers and heads – you form a lab – a creative community. Together we redefine design.
We are making big strides in the technology field with a lot of projects looking into surveillance and augmented reality. Filip Setmanuk approached the gaming industry with a critical eye in “Quest for Reality” – a great title.
In it he is exploring screen addiction in the hopes of helping addicts to better understand others and therefore themselves. He introduces a film aesthetic into the field of gaming, as a first step to bring higher art into a medium dominated by violence.
There is room for play in a lot of other work. Wouter Vastenouw designed a rubbish bin that children can kick their trash into like a football goal. Hannah van Luttervelt made a series of cuddly toys that are one to one scale models of various weapons of mass destruction. Should children be playing with nuclear bombs? But should governments be playing with them either?
Hannah’s project is the result of a collaboration between the Man and Leisure department and the local government of The Hague. This brought peace as a theme into this graduation, a theme extremely relevant in this day and age. We thank the Hague and all our other Friends who made many of today’s projects possible.
Next to peace we see a wish for the freedom to be yourself with many projects dealing with gender and queer theory. Like Olle Lundin who explores gender and how what is broadly considered the norm is completely self-perpetuating by analyzing the Van Abbemuseum art collection and Vogue magazine. Projects like this reveal how our view on gender is so constrained. And not just gender but our nervous acceptance of anything that might be deemed “other”.
One final theme I’d like to point out is the ongoing sensitivity and strive for innovation in dealing with our diminishing natural resources.
Thomas Missé, outraged by the perpetual carbon emissions of thermal power plants, investigates ways to create an economical and sustainable material for the afterlife of burnt coal. He proposes using raw fly ash to create a polymer, which is strong and safe and can be easily made on or near thermal sites.
So dear graduates - Today starts a new reality. A reality you will help to shape as the professional designers that you now are.
Congratulations.
Thomas Widdershoven