Claiming Space

What if public space became your new stage? With Claiming Space, we present a mobile design exhibition in transparent cargo bikes, spread throughout the city. An initiative by DEMO – a community for experimental design practices – created for and by designers without a fixed space. In the run-up to Dutch Design Week 2025, our glass cargo bikes will already be making their way through Eindhoven in August and September. Each bike features a QR code with a call to action: Hey Designer, still need space for DDW? Sign Up! During DDW itself, we’ll pop up in unexpected locations: from the central station square to industrial corners, parks, plazas, and passageways. At key moments, the bikes will move through the city like a slow, meandering design poem. Along the way, we’ll spark conversations with passersby about space, design, and visibility. Everyone is invited to pause – literally – and reflect on who gets space, and who doesn’t. The selected works all respond to this theme: claiming space, sharing space, losing space. This project builds on the outcomes of Project NextUp, which we presented at DDW24. In that project, designers explored questions around Eindhoven’s public spaces in collaboration with the Municipality of Eindhoven and Cultuur Eindhoven. Claiming Space is also a response to the loss of our former physical home – the old VVV building at Stationsplein, recently demolished to make way for new towers. By reinventing ourselves in public space, we raise questions around ownership, access, and urban transformation. With Claiming Space, we make space visible. Temporarily. But not without impact. *In the images chairs are being used as placeholders for the designs