As many other events, this year's Dutch Design Week will be held mainly online. The virtual platform is a worth doing experience for its curated contents and immersive, pristine interface. From 17 ot 25 October it will be possible to participate to talks, live chats with designers, virtual tours, live TV, news and video exhibitions. For anyone who has felt the design FOMO in these corona times, here is the right antidote: all conferences and events are recorded and can be seen any time.

As one of the official partners, Domus was invited to chose a theme for a virtual tour and select 10 representatives. We went for "Brave New Talents", or better say: who are the young designers at the DDW20 that are effectively representing this era of change, confusion and possible opportunities?

When paradigms shift it is hard to look at design with the same old eyes. We have new questions, new perplexities and new certainties. We might even ask ourselves, timidly: do we still need design? When we look at the work of some young talents that are bravely riding the crazy horse of our era, the answer is: probably yes. So let them take us by the hand through this strange world, with rising awareness and potential opportunities. We have selected ten new talents that have presented their work in this virtual arena.

Projects range from the matches and mismatches between humans and technology to a future where we are in symbiosis with a multitude of ecosystems; they question the dogma of time, envision peculiar systems to preserve individual biological identities and produce soft materials to reimagine the way we dress, present our bodies and reveal (or not) our personality. Fungi becomes part of fashion that turns into biofashion, the language of plants enters our daily alphabet and we can design our own protein resources. Some of them look at the past to strenghten their presence in the future, by drawing upon ancient arts techniques and translating the design knowledge of the recent past into videogames to better understand and navigate those concepts.

Looking at these projects can be scary or fascinating, it can propel attraction or rather distance, but this is our present and we see it through their genuine visions. Being them technologies, nature and flora, or ancient technical wisdom, all these works share an attitude towards reconstruction and tranformation, an innovative alchemy of materials that appear familiar and yet not seen before.