Aside from the main programme, the audience has a chance to take part in so called 'break-out sessions', more interactive and smaller scaled presentations revolving around a certain theme.
The last edition I got to visit when a friend of mine had a spare ticket. I remember coming home inspired (albeit rather dazed from the long day of listening...), so when the BNO (Association for Dutch designers) asked me to moderate one of the break-out sessions this year, I couldn't say no.
The session I got to present was called 'What Green can do for Design' and -being organized by 'De Groene Offerte' ('the Green Offer'), a project of the BNO that focuses on uniting designers and clients in the search for sustainable design solutions- was all about sustainability.
During the break-out we had 6 presentations lined up. All from young designers who presented projects that all in some way had something to do with sustainability.
One of the speakers was Jihyun Ryou, a Korean designer who studied at the Design Academy in Eindhoven and currently lives in Amsterdam. She designed a project named 'Save food from the fridge'.
I actually remember noticing this project at a Design Academy graduation show some years ago. Its cleverness and low-tech esthetic appealed to me in such a way it is the only project I remembered from the whole show.
Here's (part of) what she writes about her project on the 'Save food from the fridge'-website.
"Through the research into the current situation of food preservation, I’ve learned that we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator. We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it.
Therefore my design looks at re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food, which is closer to nature. Furthermore, it aims to bring back the connection between different levels of living beings, we as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings."
Her design consists of 5 wall-elements, each specially suited to preserve a kind of food.
As she told us during the presentation: right now it is possible to buy a (valuable) handmade version of the project by getting in touch with Jihyun personally. At the moment she is working on a produced version of the elements, which hopefully means her design will hit the stores (and my wall??) soon.
