Series on Materials, an exhibition programme within which an individual material is examined from historic, speculative, and sensory perspectives. Fellowships form the starting point of an exploration of the various materials, after which a formal approach is selected in which to present the outcomes to the public, be it an exhibition, publication, or film. Previous projects have included WOOD: The Cyclical Nature of Materials, Sites and Ideas (fellow Dan Handel), PLASTIC: Promises of a Home-made Future (fellow Tal Erez), and GLASS: Engine of Progress (curators Koehorst in 't Veld).

The Temporary Fashion Museum was an experiment that turned the entire building of Het Nieuwe Instituut into the first national fashion museum in the Netherlands. The exhibition interrogated the myths of renewal and timelessness that underpin the fashion system, and approached time as fashion does—as a fluid phenomenon and a framework for speculation. The Temporary Fashion Museum also dealt with the museum as an institutional model, played with possible approaches to the visitor, and introduced activities such as shopping, dressing up, and making into the exhibition space.

The New Material Award is a biennial award for material innovation by artists, designers, and architects, organised in collaboration between Stichting Doen, Fonds Kwadraat and Het Nieuwe Instituut. The award functions in two ways: a jury selects two winners through the competition every two years, while the website also works as an archive and research resource in various categories. Various submissions are also exhibited during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven and the Salone del Mobile in Milan.

Biodesign, an exhibition based on a wide range of projects that harness living systems for types of creative production within art and design, curated by William Myers. Biodesign links advances in fields such as medicine and architecture with challenges related to climate change, increasing populations, and resource depletion—envisioning a system in which design, production and use take in to account the consequences they wreak on different environments and forms of life. The exhibition actively stimulated speculative investigations through workshops, including a presentation by renowned performance artist Stelarc.

Matter is a series that explores the shifting relationship between design practice and matter. It brings together designers and other practitioners to imagine non-exploitative and non-human centric forms of engagements with materiality, and inquires what it means to design with social and ecological sensitivity in the age of escalating environmental crisis. 

Het Nieuwe Instituut founded the International Materials & Design Network to organise collaborative projects with international partner organisations, to enable knowledge exchange on innovation in materials, design and sustainability and to support talented Dutch designers to expand their international networks.

As the curators of the exhibition Finders Keepers, the editors of the design and crafts magazine MacGuffin reveal the universe of the collector, bringing together objects from dozens of collections and exploring the collectors’ strategies, the aesthetic pleasure of collecting and the hidden life of things.

Surfaces are full of contradictions; declarations of falsehood and denials. Designing the Surface, an exhibition where the final topcoat targets the senses, investigated a compendium of artefacts over five sets: lustre, patina, faux, teflon and agency.

With a temporary archive installation, Het Nieuwe Instituut speculated on the possible contents of an archive for design and digital culture from the Netherlands. Who will save what – and how, and why – for future generations? Together with its visitors, Speculative Design Archive uncovered the value of both acknowledged masterpieces and forgotten treasures.

And Other Spectres is a series of essays, exhibitions, public events that investigate agents that, being generally imperceptible or barely visible to the human eye, are able to permeate the sphere of the body (whether it is human, machinic or that of the nation-state) and its prosthesis in the form of computers, domestic and private spaces, triggering a multitude of cultural stories and fears. The series includes the projects Malware and Spirits in the Material World.

This exhibition considers the role of a fashion garment as a socio-political carrier. The hoodie is a staple of contemporary dress, hyped as a trend and a must-have item; but elsewhere it is also a topic of moral panic, banned by certain institutions and dissected by the media as an emblem of inequality, crime or deviancy. Curated by writer and curator Lou Stoppard.

Reading Sites is a series of written perspectives on the broader field of design. Taking events from design weeks to biennials as its starting point, the series invites designers, writers and critics to reflect on emerging tendencies and design ideologies, arriving at new narratives that can foster alternative, shared and non-exploitative futures.

A diverse series of dialogues with makers, designers, journalists and critics on design. The discussions take a close look at the designer’s process from raw material to final object, exploring issues of aesthetic and technological change, ethical positions, sustainable cycles, and innovation in how objects perform and interact. In a culture saturated with design and mediated by digital technologies, these dialogues explore how the traditional sense of meaning, value, and materiality are being reinvented.