Graduation Show 2025
The Graduation Show pulses with urgency this year. Across objects, spaces, films, performances and experiences, the exhibition forms a responsive, rhythmic landscape—alive with materials in motion and ideas in flux. Works vibrate, rotate and unfold over time; others invite touch, talk or collaboration. Together, they reveal design as a living environment of shifting tempos, materials and perspectives—restless, communicative and deeply entangled with environments, technologies, bodies and the unsettled conditions of contemporary life.
The exhibition unfolds through a series of distinct atmospheres. Underground, Space One gathers time-based works in darkened rooms of film, sound and other work. The new Garden extends from outdoors into an adjoining studio, hosting participatory projects and live activations. The Glass Rooms on the ground floor and the Gallery upstairs present material installations with performative and participatory works, creating a landscape that shifts between moments of calm and bursts of activity. The Bookshop hosts theses and publications; while an information area includes student-led initiatives and the Trans Realities Lab, showing how the graduates’ energy grows from the academy’s wider ecosystem.
Visitors are invited to move through this landscape at their own rhythm—sometimes quietly receptive, sometimes actively participating. Each project proposes its own mode of encounter, from hands-on interaction to close observation of techniques, craft and detail. Following these cues traces a journey through the graduates’ inner worlds and the urgent social, ecological and political realities that give their work life.
The show will also present the Award Ceremony for the annual Gijs Bakker, René Smeets and Melkweg Awards. The nominees have been selected during the assessment of the Master and Bachelor graduation projects by a jury of experts who convened at Design Academy Eindhoven in June.
The winners will receive a sum of € 2,000 and a trophy designed by DAE alumnus Olga Flor in collaboration with EE Labels.
DAE Thanks its partners for their support on GS25:
