Dutch Design Awards

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Dutch Design Awards

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🏆 | Celebrating how designers continue to chart the way forward. Emerging Talent Award 2025: 15 nominees leading the field into the future

08/10/2026

Rather than designing from a blank slate, fashion and costume designer (PAPA)Yorick treats existing garments as raw material.

Using clips, intuitive draping, and improvised deconstruction techniques, he tailors new silhouettes through unorthodox construction systems, imbuing them with theatricality and historical references.

His debut collection, styled entirely from his own wardrobe across nearly 300 looks on friends and family, materialised into an eccentric cast of farmers, sailors, pirates, maidens, and aristocrats. Under his eponymous label, Papa Yorick, Westerkamp rejects an industry’s demand for constant novelty, shifting how garments already in circulation are worn, read, and physically repurposed.

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1,3-8. Collection 73, My Own Wardrobe_, photographed by Nikola Lamburov
2. Courtesy of the designer

07/10/2026

Underpinning Ülkühan Akgül’s sculptural fashion is an incisive socio-political commentary. Interrogating identity, heritage, and institutional power dynamics directly on the body, he weaves social and cultural scripts into meticulous garment construction—translating systemic frictions into tactile forms.

Transforming unconventional materials, from artificial turf to discarded Lego bricks, Ülkühan Akgül subverts traditional silhouettes, posture, and cultural expectations. In his work, form and materiality embody societal tensions and physical labour, anchored at the core of his debut collection Etnisch Profiteren at Amsterdam Fashion Week.

Through curatorial and collective projects under ULKUHANBATUHAN, he deploys a research-driven approach to garment making, narrative building, and material experimentation to dismantle the power asymmetries at play.

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1. MENS, ERGER JE NIET Ülkühan&Batuhan with
2. Portrait by Mees Mulder
3. ETNISCH PROFITEREN. UNGUIS ORACLE photographed by Dion Bal.
4. Reflections on fashion at Kunstmuseum Den Haag
5. Detail at Kunstmuseum: schermlinks uniform withprint.
6. MENS, ERGER JE NIET
7. ETNISCH PROFITEREN

06/10/2026

Centring on worldbuilding and worlding, Sondi crafts digital spaces and video games that foreground marginalised voices and other perspectives systemically excluded from dominant techno-futures.

Through these worlds, she interrogates how narrative and power operate within virtual environments—tracing encoded biases, algorithmic discrimination, game mechanics, and the portrayal of people, places, and ecologies.

Moving fluidly between virtual and physical spaces, she reflects on the interplay between our corporeal, spiritual, and digital selves, using game engine environments as a starting point for her worlds. Through critical play and speculative worlding, she reclaims virtual spaces as territories capable of healing, resistance, and collective dreaming.

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1. Mbombo (still)
2. Portrait by Ruby Cruden
3. Mbombo. Photographed Elodie Vreeburg
4. PlayPretend. Photographed by Aad Hoogendoorn
5. PlayPretend. Photographed by Aad Hoogendoorn
6. PlayPretend. Photographed by Aad Hoogendoorn
7. Mbombo (still)

05/10/2026

Ori Orisun ☼ Merhav Merhav follows natural lac—a deep amber, translucent resin produced by insects—to explore its material possibilities across human and more-than-human worlds. She bridges traditional crafts, such as glassblowing, with additive manufacturing, investigating how this biomaterial exerts living agency in shaping, or even growing, our built environment.

Through her research platform, Made by Insects, Merhav collaborates with both scientific institutions like the Bio-Polymer Lab in Breda and lac-harvesting communities in India and Thailand. Her sculptural works materialise these ecological entanglements. Through the mutualism of insects, trees, and human labour, her craft stretches this heritage material into the present to imagine regenerative systems for producing, inhabiting, and understanding the world.

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1. Morphogenesis photographed by Studio Mimesis
2. Ori Orisun Merhav photographed by Studio MimesisDetail:
3. Morphocatalysis photographed by Studio Mimesis
4. Morphocatalysis photographed by Studio Mimesis

03/10/2026

Rosalie Apituley bridges the gap between public understanding and the infrastructure behind the energy transition.

Through humour and a participatory approach, she invites audiences to stand atop the workings of our energy supply, allowing them to experience and take part in it.

Apituley has a playful and enjoyable way to connect her audience with the energy transition using their immediate surroundings. Rather than treating the grid as an abstract technical realm, she visualises how these hidden systems actually work and how their use relates to the rhythms of the city.

By engaging these societal and cultural dimensions that shape our understanding of energy, she makes the discussion accessible and engaging: opening alternative ways of imagining a sustainable future.

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Picknick Trafo photographed by Maarten van der Wolf. 2024.
Rosalie Apitiuley photographed by Michèle Giebing
Uit Uit de Meterkast 2022.
Wie bouwt de Heetste Keet. 2024.
Zomerijsbaan photographed by Jesse Grooten. 2026.
Kabel Collection 2022.

02/10/2026

explores how identity and heritage come alive through the spaces and objects around us. Moving naturally between art, design, fashion, and architecture, he builds narratives rooted in shared community and the hybridity of material culture.

Abiadh operates with precision and street-level authenticity: having steered design at Tom Sachs in New York and worked at Patta, alongside his own independent practice, he balances high-concept art production, sharp ex*****on, and cross-disciplinary design leadership.

He co-founded , a studio combining creative direction, spatial design, and visual identity to build culturally resonant environments.

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1. Nike x Apron Records. Gianni Gallant.
2. Necim Abiadh
3. Tom Sachs Nikecraft. Genevieve Hanson.
4. Nike x Apron Records. Gianni Gallant.
5. Nike x Air Afrique. Camille Lemonnier.
6. Nike x Maha. Jordan Hemingway
7. Van Moof. Sebastian Boon.

01/10/2026

Maggie Laylon Saunders is a social designer and the founder of Striptopia, an initiative that brings underground cultures into public view, dismantling conventional boundaries between design, nightlife, and s— work. Collaborating with s— workers, performers, and marginalised communities, Striptopia orchestrates pop-up clubs and immersive spatial encounters.

What began as an experimental platform to reimagine the str!p club through social design has ripened into an independent cultural platform active across Dutch museums, festivals, and clubs: from the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam to Down The Rabbit Hole and RADION Amsterdam .

Drawing on her experience working as a str!pper in the United States, Saunders deploys spectacle, entertainment, and bodily expression to confront stigma, creating spaces dedicated to autonomy, consent, and collective self-expression.

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1 Striptopia photographed by Koen van der Kam
2 Maggie Laylon Saunders photographed by Koen van der Kam
3 Striptopia at Down the Rabbit Hole festival photographed by Bart Heemskerk

30/09/2026

Jun Fujisaku 藤咲潤 reinterprets the order and values associated with the home, making modular furniture and everyday objects designed to change form and function.

His approach is radical and playful: an ironing board turns into an office chair, a cabinet collapses into a desk, a broom into a suitcase—these are hybrid tools that shift among everyday typologies, gender roles, and cultural codes.

He has developed a modular language for these transformations, using industrial aluminium profiles and wood, creating works that are inherently participatory and architecturally relational. Staging small-scale spatial choreographies, Fujisaku’s craft modulates our relationship to domestic and office environments, renegotiating everyday interactions within the hidden structures of recognised and unrecognised forms of labour.

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1. TRANSCENDERS photographed by Carlfried Verwaayen
2. Jun Fujisaku photographed by Natsume Kano
3. TRANSCENDERS photographed by Carlfried Verwaayen
4. TRANSCENDERS photographed by Carlfried Verwaayen
5. BOX
6. Partition 🔁
7. Coffee table
8. Partition photographed by Leo Koda

29/09/2026

Julia Janssen radically challenges our collective relationship with data protection, artificial intelligence, and the internet.

Across performative experiences and interactive installations, she takes her audiences behind the surface of apps and technologies they use every day —breaking down issues like algorithmic bias, corporate surveillance, and informed consent to a general public.

Through her art and research, Janssen explores ways to build an internet that is not driven by commercial incentives, but anchored in human rights and public values like equality, autonomy, and democracy. As a public speaker and digital rights advocate, she provokes a different narrative for our (digital) future.

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1. Chadding Julia Janssen. 2026.
2. Julia Janssen photographed by Maarten Delobel.
3,5. 00146 seconds Julia Janssen. 2019.
4. Chadding photographed by Lotte Dale. 2026.
6. Dear Data Julia Janssen. 2022.
7. Mapping the Oblivion photographed by Matteo Losurdo. 2023.
8. Ask anything photographed by Sans Studio Amsterdam. 2026.

28/09/2026

Through physical artefacts, food, and bodily performance, Hsin Min Chan confronts cultural power dynamics, questioning how otherness and identity are consumed.

Her work stands as an active protest rooted in lived experience: a subversion of the exotic gaze and the guise of normalcy in daily life.

The Taiwanese designer deconstructs her own experience and body through a performative and critical lens on gender, power, and cultural politics—re-materialising them across new digital and social realms to challenge how identity is perceived and distorted by colonial curiosity.

Staging encounters charged with visceral, absurd, and tactile unease, Chan draws the viewer into an intimate, sharp discomfort, confronting the very positions and cultural narratives we occupy.

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1,4. Performative Labour - photographed by Pierre Castignola
2. Hsin Min Chan photographed by Willeke Machiels
3,5. Smuggling Bodies.
6. Exotic as a Species
7. Perpetual Exotism Machine (A Hot Sauce Fountain) - photographed by Yufei Gao
8. Rendered Opaque - photographed by A***n

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