Works on Show in Milan

Niels Shoe Meulman and Dennis Polak of Unruly helped four underprivileged teenagers to design a coat of arms for Amsterdam’s multicultural Bijlmer district. The six-by-three-metre Coat of Arms was emblazoned with icons representing gastronomic culture, the Ajax football club and the country of Suriname. It hung for a time at the nearby railway station.

Fashion designer Brigitte Hendrix’s collection of tough-looking clothing is full of symbolic references to krumping, the culture of violence, and the film Donnie Darko – and the Dutch still lifes of the seventeenth century. And as the title indicates, we can see here that something isn’t quite right.

For his graduation project at Eindhoven’s Design Academy, Ivan Kasner turned ten natural objects to stone. To do so, he sought the assistance of the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, whose vacuum oven he used to fossilise these contemporary everyday objects.

Ineke Hans built a bench with a hole cut into it for a new tree to grow through, replacing the one used to manufacture the bench. The concept of the piece, commissioned by Triodos Bank and the Dutch forestry service, is simple but heartfelt. And above all, it’s beautiful.

Jeroen Verhoeven of Demakersvan used drawings of seventeenth-century furniture to make his Industrialized Wood table. He converted different views of them into a three-dimensional design using a computer programme. In this way, he was able to industrially manufacture this table based on traditional craftsman’s forms.

Max Kisman, Jim Richardson and Tamye Riggs invited designers around the world to create digital flowers in remembrance of the tsunami disaster. The ‘Fleurons of Hope’ were collected and converted into computer fonts made up of pictures rather than letters. There are a total of more than 400 graphic images by 230 designers and artists. The fonts cost twenty dollars from Myfonts.com; proceeds go to the victims.

It took Friso Kramer, the doyen of functional design, twelve days – two of which he spent in bed from exhaustion – to make a chair out of a tree trunk. It seems a world away from his famous Revolt chair, but both pieces are ergonomically sound and carefully finished down to the last detail.

Artist Birthe Leemeijer has created a perfume that expresses life on a Dutch polder through the medium of scent. Working closely with local residents, she sought out the characteristic smells of the landscape. The perfume’s packaging, too, is an homage to Mastenbroek. With Leemeijer, graphic designer Renate Boere created a box that’s austere on the outside, but inside shows the polder through the seasons and contains a leaflet with a map to Mastenbroek.

When artist Esther Polak and researcher Ieva Auzina discovered that much Latvian milk is transported to the Netherlands, they decided to follow its progress from the cow’s udder to the consumer’s mouth using GPS navigation. Their installation received the prestigious Golden Nica new-media prize and is now on display in the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, as part of the exhibition Making Things Public.

The introduction of fishing quotas has greatly changed Iceland. The young people there no longer wish to work in the fishing industry and are leaving for the city. Low-paid jobs are being filled by immigrants. In the photography book Roots of the Rúntur, Rob Hornstra has recorded these changes in penetrating portraiture.

A table that’s more than two kilometres long ought to get people talking to each other again. Hans Meiboom wants to build just such a table in a multicultural park in Amsterdam, and he hopes people will use it for multiple functions – even as a catwalk, if it comes to that.

Artist Tina Roeder endeavours to make us look at objects with new and different eyes. Naked Couch, her version of a doctor’s examining table, is made of nothing but a steel frame and some flesh-coloured leather belts. Roeder hopes it will help the viewer to experience the examining table’s combination of intimacy and anonymity.