STRP, in collaboration with Trans Realities Lab (Design Academy Eindhoven) and Limestone Books, presents a series of talks for young makers.

DAE graduates, teachers, and alumni working at the cutting edge of technology and design cover a range of themes necessary for contemporary artistic and maker practices. The winners of this year's STRP Young ACT Awards will be announced on Sunday as a special part of the program.

Got some time between the talks? Visit the temporary bookstore by Limestone Books and make your first acquaintance with STRP's new space; PROTOTYPE.

See speaker information below.

Saturday:

Whole day: Limestone Bookstore @ PROTOTYPE

12:00 - 12:15 | Introduction
12:15 - 13:00 | STRP Young ACT Nominees:
Elin Aspfors, Ming-Chun (Patrick) Chiang, Kai-Hsiang Wen
15 min. break
13:15 - 13:45 | Cream on Chrome
15 min. break
14:00 - 14:30 | Melani de Luca
15 min. break
14:45 - 15:15 | Bart Hess

Sunday:

Whole day: Limestone Bookstore @ PROTOTYPE

12:00 - 12:15 | Introduction
12:15 - 13:00 | STRP Young ACT Nominees:
Sara Ballout, Daan Walder, Alice Baker
15 min. break
13:15 - 13:45 | Lua Vollaard
15 min. break
14:00 - 14:30 | HyperCulture
15 min. break
14:45 - 15:15 | DAE Trans Realities Lab
15 min. break
15:30 - 15:45 | STRP Young ACT Award Ceremony with special guest Young Advisory Board member Siem Oosterhof

New tools and technologies are continuously available and (re)shape the creative and artistic practices. Makers, teachers, and thinkers from our networks join DAE alumni and new graduates for the talks program.

Together, they take us through their processes, reflect on life after graduation, and share practical advice for emerging designers on growing their practice and visibility.

Limestone Books is taking over PROTOTYPE; STRP’s new experimental space.

PROTOTYPE is a new experimental space in Microstad that is full development. Expect exciting guests and workshops, interesting takeovers and creative and artistic re-imagination of what a physical space can be.

During 25th and 26th of October, Limestone Books reimagines the idea of a bookstore.

Drop by for a curated selection of books.

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The winners of this year's STRP Young Award for Creative Technology will be announced on Sunday by our special guest and Young ACT Board member Siem Oosterhof.

The winners get a personal project budget, support to develop future projects in form of materials and guidance by the STRP team.

Click here for more information about STRP Young ACT Award.

DAE is a partner of STRP Young Award for Creative Technology.

Cream on Chrome is a Rotterdam-based experience design studio founded by Jonas Althaus (DE) and Martina Huynh (CH). An alumni design duo who graduated from DAE.

Cream on Chrome were awarded the STRP ACT Award in 2022 for their project ‘The Environmentalist Stock Exchange (ESX)’. With their award-winning multimedia installations, they seek to involve people with pressing questions of our times.

Putting the focus of their work on interaction, they give new perspectives on economy, news media, and techno-ecologies that feel light-hearted and intuitive to explore.

Cream on Chrome collaborates with academic and cultural institutions and are regularly engaged as design educators at the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) and Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE).

Author of Steve: A Framework for AI and Identity Design

Melanie de Luca, Alumni MA Information design, is a graphic designer, researcher, and artist whose work critically examines contemporary cultural phenomena and their impact on society. She explores the intersection of the digital and physical, tangible and intangible. Her recurrent themes revolve around pop and visual culture, analysing social contexts linked to digital mass media.

Her practice combines various media such as editorial design, sculpture, and installation. In 2017, she published her first book, Post-Butt, The Power of the Image, with Onomatopee in Eindhoven, Netherlands, followed by a second edition in 2019. Recently, she released her second book, Steve, A Framework for AI and Identity Design, published by Set Margins, also in Eindhoven.

She has a PhD cum laude from IUAV, University of Venice, with a thesis on augmenting the working processes in visual identity projects with Machine Learning, an MA in Information design from the Design Academy, Eindhoven and a BA in Design and Arts from Free University, Bolzano. Melani De Luca furthermore works as a lecturer in the BA Graphic Design and Digital Media at Abadir, Academy of Design and Visual Arts, Catania, Italy.

Her commissioned work includes Art Direction, Branding and Identity, Editorial Design, Data Visualisation, Web Design, and Way finding.

Graduated from DAE, Bart Hess is a renowned artist exploring the boundaries of the human body and technology through tactile and futuristic aesthetics. Combining material studies, film, photography, and animation, Hess explores how the human body interacts with space and materials.

His projects blur the line between skin and textile, organic and synthetic, physical and digital.

For six months, young people will work with Bart Hess and the STRP team to design, prototype, and activate a space that is both an artwork and a living laboratory, a platform for testing textures, movement, light, and sensory experiments.

The opening of the new space will take place from March 26-29, 2026, during STRP Spring.

Click here for more information on this project.

Lua Vollaard, teaches at Design Academy Eindhoven and is a curator and writer based in Amsterdam. She works as a curator of contemporary art at Stroom Den Haag, developing projects on the codes that govern and how they shape the public domain. Recent projects include Jenna Sutela –ave bossa, bow ole (2025); The Cost of Alliance (group exhibition, 2025); and Agustina Woodgate – More Heat than Light(2024, in collaboration with QuTech).

As one third of the collective Superkilogirls collective, she researches the material infrastructures of computing and its entanglement with women’s labour. She writes about contemporary art, interventions in institutions, and technological histories for Art in America, Frieze, and e-flux, and others.

HyperCulture is a designer-director duo from Eindhoven, The Netherlands, formed by Floris Vos (Alumni DAE) and Peter van de Riet. The meaning of Hyperculture is the natural outcome of living in a digitally connected society capable of rapid communication.

They draw inspiration from pop culture, subcultures and ethnic cultures to create visual aesthetics that have a unique narrative. Value and excitement can be created by remixing and re-contextualizing visual languages from different cultures, eras and forms. They work in the domains of design, branding, animation, motion graphics,film and visuals arts.

The Trans Realities Lab is happy to host STRP's event in their satellite space during Dutch Design Week. The TRL is an initiative led by Professor Ian Biscoe at Design Academy Eindhoven; it is designed to explore the convergence of physical and digital realities.

The lab serves as a platform for experimentation across virtual environments, speculative design, and hybrid storytelling. Its goal, besides research, is to equip students with tools to critically engage with immersive technologies while fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.

This year, STRP selects six graduation projects from DAE’s open call as nominees for the STRP Young Award for Creative Technology. One of these is chosen to receive support to further develop their work in the context of STRP’s program. During these talks, we dive deep into the nominated graduation projects, discussing their themes, process, and the broader implications of their work.