Feast your eyes on vases baked like an obscure Swedish cake, 3D-printed paper wares, and more at Design Academy Eindhoven?s 2018 graduate show Peruse the shelves of any shop and you?re likely to encounter products made from a very short list of techniques: injection-molding, slip casting, pressing, and maybe CNC machining. These processes have been optimized over time for efficiency and cost effectiveness and a lot of what we buy has become uniform as a result. Uniqueness is a casualty.
Not so at the 2018 Design Academy Eindhoven graduate exhibition. Students developed creative fabrication techniques that yielded brilliantly weird, beautiful, and thought-provoking objects. The pieces frequently addressed the pitfalls of mass production, railed against the environmental effects of consumerism, and challenged normative forms. In the future, these techniques might just end up in products we purchase for our homes. Below are 14 standouts. Vases baked like Swedish cakes

Ronald Smits, courtesy Design Academy Eindhoven
Erika Emerén, Ornament Now.

Spettekaka cake, a Swedish dessert, translates to ?cake on a spit? and it?s usually made by drizzling batter on skewer that slowly rotates over an open fire. Designer Erika Emerén riffed on this technique to produce one-of-a-kind clay vases with tactile surfaces and vibrant glazes. ?Why not approach high-end design as a delicious treat"? she posits.
A mixed-media search for meaning

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