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Remember clip art and motion effects from the 90's? The days of clumsy presentation templates are over, and the ability to create beautifully designed slides is easier than ever.
Do you need to create presentations at work or school? Great design can help your ideas stand out and read effectively - improving your ability to become a great communicator.

Try these five tips to improve your presentation design skills. To put them into practice, jump straight the interactive tutorial at the end of this blog!

01 . Use design techniques

Forget pages of dot points and 3d titles. Presentations don't need to be boring - use your design skills to create beautiful slides that relay your message powerfully.

These steps were taken to create this slide:

An image was used a background with a filter applied to create a moody 'Shanghai' feel.

The transparency of the white square shape was increased to create a text holder.

Different font sizes and colors have been used to create typographic hierarchy.

Lines were placed above and below the body text to break it up.

02. Place your images in grids

Avoid naked images - using grids will give your presentation a professional edge.

Place your images intentionally within your grid. Notice how the bottom two images share a diagonal line, while the top image has a hard horizon line - these complement each other.

Placing images in a grid also leaves you with lots of white space to place text. This will ensure your written content won't be overpowered by other graphic elements.

03. Match a strong cover with simple content slides

The idea of 'less is more' is about achieving better design through simplicity. Apply this for your body slides - avoid using too many elements (images, shapes, different fonts etc) to ensure your message comes across clearly.

To balance out your simple slides, add a strong cover. See how an image has been used a background in the cover slide above and paired with a solid shape as a text holder.

04. Use the same frames

Frames are a great way to contain your information. These frames have been created using a transparent shape.

Duplicate your slides to use your frames consistently - a key principle of good presentation design.

05. Duplicate your slides

Once you've created a slide you're happy with, save it as a template. This means you can duplicate it and adapt the content as body slides. This provides cohesion and is a great time-saver if you're turning over presentations on a regular basis.

As an extra design tip, bold numbers and bullet points are great visual devices to break up your information.
Discover how easy it is to create great presentation design in Canva - try the interactive tutorial below!

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How to design a powerful presentation - Learn

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Remember clip art and motion effects from the 90's? The days of clumsy presentation templates are over, and the ability to create beautifully designed slides is easier than ever. Do you need to create presentations at work or school? Great design can help your ideas stand out and read effectively - improving your ability to become a great communicator.

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UnSplash - Free Images

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Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash

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Beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project. Better than any royalty free or stock photos.

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trimble google sketchup software 3d modeling design cad training tutorials learning push pull earth architecture interior woodworking

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SketchUp users are architects, designers, builders, makers and engineers. They are the people who shape the physical world. They are important, and they deserve great tools because great tools produce great work. At SketchUp, we do our best to make great tools for drawing. For our users, drawing is thinking.

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How to Make a Double Exposure Effect in Photoshop | Adobe Creative Cloud

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How to Make 3D Lettering in Illustrator | Adobe Creative Cloud

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adobe creative cloud photoshoptouch adobecollage adobeproto adobedebut adobekuler touchapps service applications "creative cloud" "creative suite" "adobe ideas" "photoshop touch" "adobe collage" "adobe proto" "adobe debut" "adobe kuler" "adobe touch apps" "touch apps" "creative cloud" "mobile applications" "adobe systems" "web design" "graphic design" "website design" "mobile apps" "adobe creative" "adobe creative suite"

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Adobe® Creative Cloud™ brings together everything you need to create your greatest work. One simple membership gives you and your team access to the very latest versions of all the Adobe professional creative desktop applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and more plus new features and upgrades as soon as they're available.

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✄ Inside My (A2) A Level Graphic communication Coursework Sketchbook  | Lili Phillips

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Henrietta Ross introduces her sketchbook work which includes research and development for: the Letterform Tasks; Visual Grammar; Colour Exploration; and Structure and the City (Professional and Academic Contexts). Henrietta outlines the Design for Visual Communication course mantra of Document, Experiment, Evaluate and Contextualise. The video is useful for those new to visual communication who don't necessarily understand sketchbook work.

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Why I'm an architect that designs for social impact, not buildings | Liz Ogbu | TEDxMidAtlantic

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TED Talk

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Bastian Schaefer: A 3D-printed jumbo jet?

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Designer Bastian Schaefer shows off a speculative design for the future of jet planes, with a skeleton inspired by strong, flexible, natural forms and by the needs of the world's, ahem, growing population. Imagine an airplane that's full of light and space -- and built up from generative parts in a 3D printer.

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TED Talk

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Amos Winter: The cheap all-terrain wheelchair

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How do you build a wheelchair ready to blaze through mud and sand, all for under $200? MIT engineer Amos Winter guides us through the mechanics of an all-terrain wheelchair that's cheap and easy to build -- for true accessibility -- and gives us some lessons he learned along the road.

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TED Talk

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Design Thinking: Solving Life’s Problems | Suresh Jayakar | TEDxCrenshaw

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TED Talk

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Mileha Soneji: Simple hacks for life with Parkinson's

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Simple solutions are often best, even when dealing with something as complicated as Parkinson's. In this inspiring talk, Mileha Soneji shares accessible designs that make the everyday tasks of those living with Parkinson's a bit easier. "Technology is not always it," she says. "What we need are human-centered solutions."

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IBM Design Thinking Video

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What's the Difference?

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Ethics in Graphic Design — Eileen MacAvery Kane

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“Ethics in Graphic Design” is a forum for the exploration of ethical issues in graphic design. It is intended to be used as a resource and to create an open dialogue among graphic designers about these critical issues.

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Asking Good Questions

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Learning how to ask good questions is a cornerstone of learning and living. It's a practice we use every day. So much of our success in life depends on asking the right questions. So how do we actually do it? It's easy when you have a solid process.

When we ask good questions in education, the benefits are immeasurable. It lets us clearly define problems and expectations. Students' research becomes more productive. They have better team communication. It lets them view challenges proactively. It encourages deeper reflection and better learning processes.

5 Steps Helps You Ask Good Questions

In order to help you and your students with this, we created the infographic below and called it 5 Steps to Asking Good Questions. The idea behind it is simple: to give you and your students the edge you need to ask good questions, improve communication, maximize research results, and much more.

Asking good questions goes hand in hand with taking ownership of learning. It's not reasonable to expect a teacher to give students the right questions, either. They must be able to form them on their own. That's what this 5-step process does.

Each stage has guiding questions attached to it. These are some things students can consider to help them ask good questions:

1. Focus: What specifically do I want to know? What information am I missing? Is this more than a simple YES or NO question? Am I going for deeper knowledge?

2. Purpose: Why am I asking this? Do I want to gather facts or opinions? Do I need simple clarification? Do I want to offer a different perspective?

3. Intent: How do I want people to respond? Do I want the answer to be of help to others? Am I asking to start an argument or open a discussion? Is the question superficial and not really useful or important? Am I asking out of frustration or curiosity? Do I really care about the answer? Am I willing to show respect/deference to the person I'm asking?

4. Framing: Am I using easily understandable terms and wording? Is my question neutral or does it contain bias or opinion? Is it too long or too short? Does it contain the focus of what I want to know? Does the question focus on only one thing? Is it muddled with other inquiries that don't belong?

5. Follow-up: Do I have any more specific questions to add? Will the person I'm asking be available for other questions if need be? If I still don't have the answer I need, what's my plan? What can I do if I still don't understand?

The art of asking good questions isn't lost. If we let our students know that, we've given them a great gift. They have permission to be curious and creative. They get to think and question in a way that helps them become better thinkers.

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The 5 Key Steps for Helping You Ask Good Questions [Infographic]

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Learning how to ask good questions is a cornerstone of learning and living. It's a practice we use every day. So much of our success in life depends on asking the right questions. So how do we actually do it? It's easy when you have a solid process.

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Design Research

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In part two of A Comprehensive Guide To Product Design, I'll cover research (user research and market research), user analysis (modeling of the users), and ideation (how users interact with the product, the product structure, and UI).

Product research

Once the product vision is defined, product research (which naturally includes user and market research) provides the other half of the foundation for great design. To maximize your chances of success, conduct insightful research before making any product decisions. Remember that the time spent researching is never time wasted. Good research informs your product, and the fact that it comes early in the design process will save you a lot of resources (time and money) down the road (because fewer adjustments will need to be made). Plus, with solid research, selling your ideas to stakeholders will be a lot easier.

Product research is a broad discipline, and covering all aspects of it in this article would be impossible. For more information on the topic, make sure to read A Comprehensive Guide to UX Research Methods.

Conduct user research

As product creators, our responsibilities lie first and foremost with the people who will use the products we design. If we don't know our users, how can we create great products for them?

Good user research is key to designing a great user experience. Conducting user research enables you to understand what your users actually need. When it comes to product research, researchers have a few different techniques to choose from.

User interviews

Gathering information through direct dialog is a well-known user research technique that can give the researcher rich information about users. This technique can help the researcher assess user needs and feelings both before a product is designed and long after it's released. Interviews are typically conducted by one interviewer speaking to one user at a time for 30 minutes to an hour. After the interviews are done, it's important to synthesize the data to identify insights in the form of patterns.
Tips:

Try to conduct interviews in person. If you have a choice, in-person interviews are better than remote ones (via phone or web-based video). In-person interviews are preferable because they provide much more behavioral data than remote ones. You'll gain additional insights by observing body language and listening for verbal cues (tone, inflection, etc.).

Plan your questions. All questions you ask during the interview should be selected according to the learning goal. A wrong set of questions can not only nullify the benefits of the interview session, but also lead product development down the wrong path.

Find an experienced interviewer. A skilled interviewer makes users feel comfortable by asking questions in a neutral manner and knowing when and how to ask for more details.

Online surveys

Surveys and questionnaires enable the researcher to get a larger volume of responses, which can open up the opportunity for more detailed analysis. While surveys are commonly used for quantitative research, they also can be used for qualitative research. It's possible to gather qualitative data by asking open-ended questions (i.e., "What motivates you to make a purchase?" or "How do you feel when you need to return the item you purchased from us?"). The answers will be individualized and in general cannot be used for quantitative analysis.

Online surveys are relatively inexpensive to run. The downside of this method is that there's no direct interaction with respondents, and, thus, it's impossible to dive more deeply into answers provided by them.

Tips:

Keep it short. Don't forget that every extra question reduces your response rate. If the survey is too long, you may find that you don't get as many responses as you'd like. Better to send a few short surveys than to put everything you want to know into one long survey.

Open-ended versus close-ended questions. Asking open-ended questions is the best approach, but it's easy to get stuck in data analysis because every user answer requires researcher time for analysis. Plus, users quickly tire of answering open-ended questions, which usually require a lot of reading and typing.

Contextual inquiry

Contextual inquiry is a variety of field study in which the researcher observes people in their natural environment and studies them as they go about their everyday tasks. This method helps researchers obtain information about the context of use. Users are first asked a set of standard questions, such as "What is the most frequent task you typically do?," and then they are observed and questioned while they work in their own environment. The goal of contextual inquiry is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspectives.

Tips:

Don't just listen to users - observe their behavior. What people say can be different from what people do. As much as possible, observe what users do to accomplish their tasks.

Minimize interference. When studying the natural use of a product, the goal is to minimize interference from the study in order to understand behavior as close to reality as possible.

Conduct market research

You cannot ignore competitors if you want to build a great product. To be competitive, you need to know what products are available on the market and how they perform. That's why conducting market research is a crucial component of the product design process. Your ultimate goal should be to design a solution that has a competitive advantage.

Competitive research

Competitive research is a comprehensive analysis of competitor products and presentation of the results of the analysis in a comparable way. Research helps product teams understand industry standards and identify opportunities for the product in a given market segment.

A competitor is a company that shares your goals and that fights for the same thing that your product team wants. There are two types of competitors:

Direct competitors. Direct competitors are ones whose products compete head to head with your value proposition (offering the same, or very similar, value proposition to your current or future users).

Indirect competitors. Indirect competitors are those whose products target your customer base without offering the exact same value proposition. For instance, an indirect competitor's primary product or service might not capture your value proposition, but their secondary product definitely does.

Tips:

Start listing competitors before doing competitive research. Most likely you will begin to learn about competitors way before you conduct competitive research. For example, during user interviews, users might share names of products that they think are similar to the one you're proposing. During stakeholder interviews, the product owners will certainly give you a few names of products they see as competitors. It's worth creating a spreadsheet that will be used to collect the names of competitors right at the beginning of the project, and try to fill it as you do product research. Add new names to the list so that you don't forget them.

Use a cloud-based tool for competitive research. Tools such as Google Spreadsheet make it easier to share the latest up-to-date research information with a larger group of people (both teammates and stakeholders) and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

User analysis

After research, the product team must make sense of the data it's collected. The aim of the analysis phase is to draw insights from the data collected during the product research phase. Capturing, organizing, and making inferences about what users want, think, or need can help UX designers begin to understand why they want, think, or need that.

Modeling the users and their environments

Personas

Based on the product research results, UX designers can identify key user groups and create representative personas. Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a product in a similar way. The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of the key audience segments for reference. Once created, personas help product teams to understand the users' goals in specific contexts, which is particularly useful during ideation.

Tips:

Base the persona on real data. It can be tempting to invent some details about personas to make them attractive. Avoid that temptation. Every bit of the information in the persona should be based on the research. If you don't have some information, do research to fill in the gap.

Avoid using real names or details of research participants or people you know. This can bias the objectivity of your personas. (You'll end up focusing on designing for this person, rather than a group of people with similar characteristics).

For more information on personas, read Putting Personas to Work in UX Design.

Empathy map

An empathy map is a visualization tool used to articulate what a product team knows about the user. This tool helps a product team build a broader understanding of the "why" behind user needs and wants. It forces product teams to shift their focus from the product they want to build, to the people who will use the product. As a team identifies what they know about the user and then places this information on a chart, they gain a more holistic view of the user's world and the problem or opportunity space.

Tip:

Turn your empathy map into a poster. It's possible to create a nice reminder of what is user thinking or feeling by turning the empathy map into a poster. Create a few copies of the map and hang them around the office. This helps to ensure the user remains on people's minds as they work.

Ideation

The ideation phase is a time when team members brainstorm on a range of creative ideas that address the project goals. During this phase, it's critical not only to generate ideas but also to confirm that the most important design assumptions are valid.

Product teams have a lot of techniques for ideation - from sketching, which is very helpful for visualizing what some aspects of the design will look like, to storyboarding, which is used to visualize the overall interactions with a product.

Generate ideas (how users will interact with a product)

User journey mapping

A user journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. Typically, it's presented as a series of steps in which a person interacts with a product.

A user journey can take a wide variety of forms depending on the context and business goals. In its most basic form, a user journey is presented as a series of user steps and actions in a timeline skeleton. Such a layout makes it easier for all team members to understand and follow the user's narrative.

A simple user journey reflects only one possible path during one scenario.

A complex user journey can encompass experiences occurring at different time sessions and scenarios.

Tip:

Don't make user journeys too complex. While designing a user journey, it is easy to get caught up in the multiple routes a user might take. Unfortunately, this often leads to busy user journeys. Focus on creating a simple, linear journey (the ideal way to get users to the given goal).

Scenarios and storyboards

After you've identified personas, you can write scenarios of interactions. A scenario is a narrative describing a day in the life of a persona, including how a product fits into their life. A storyboard presents the user's story in a visual way - similar to a movie or comic. It can help product designers understand how people interact with a product in real life, giving designers a clear sense of what's really important to users.

Tips:

Build a strong narrative. The narrative in the story should focus on a goal the character is trying to achieve. All too often, designers jump right into explaining the details of their design before explaining the backstory. Avoid this. Your story should be structured and should have an obvious beginning, middle, and end.

Design a clear outcome. Make sure your storyboard leaves the audience with no doubt about the outcome of the story. If you're describing an unfavorable situation, end with the full weight of the problem. If you're presenting a solution, end with the benefits of that solution for your character.

For tips on creating storyboards, read The Role of Storyboarding in UX Design.

User stories

A user story is a simple description of something that the user wants to accomplish by using a product. Here is a template for user stories:

Tip:

Use user stories to prevent feature creep. Feature creep is the tendency to add more features than a product requires. When designing a product, try to refuse adding any feature without a user story that explains why that particular feature matters.

Job stories

A job story is a way to describe features. It's a description of a feature from a jobs-to-be-done perspective. A job story is an effective technique for defining a problem without being prescriptive of a solution.

Tip:

Define problems worth solving. At some point, you'll have several jobs (problems) that you'll want to create solutions for. Identify which of those problems have the most substantial impact on the user experience or your business goals.

Plan the structure of a product

Information architecture

Information architecture (IA) is the structure of a website, app, or other product. It enables users to understand where they are and where the information they want is in relation to their current position. Information architecture results in the creation of navigation, hierarchies, and categorizations. For example, when a UX designer sketches a top-level menu to help users understand where they are on a website, they're practicing information architecture.

Information architecture would benefit from the involvement of users in the IA development process. Product teams typically use a technique called card sorting for this purpose. Designers ask users to organize items (major features or topics of the product) into groups and assign categories to each group. This method helps you find out how users expect to see information grouped on a website or in an app.

Tip:

It's possible to conduct a card-sorting session online. Online card-sorting tools allow for easier scaling to a higher number of study participants. One of the most popular online tools is OptimalSort (which is free for card-sorting studies with up to 10 participants).

Generate ideas (what will the user interface look like)

Sketching

Sketching is the easiest way to visualize ideas. Drawing by hand is a fast way to visualize a concept - enabling the designer to visualize a broad range of design solutions before deciding which one to stick with.

Tip:

Use a stencil when sketching user interfaces. When you sketch on paper, it can sometimes be hard to imagine how certain UI element will look like at a realistic size. Using a stencil, it's possible to draw elements for the actual size of the device you're designing for. This is great for understanding whether a UI element you've just drawn is large enough for interaction.

Wireframing

A wireframe is a visual guide that represents a page's structure, as well as its hierarchy and key elements. Wireframes are useful for discussing ideas with team members and stakeholders, and to assist the work of visual designers and developers. Wireframing acts as the backbone of the product - designers often use them as skeletons for mockups.

Wireframes can be presented in the form of sketches.

Wireframes can also be presented as digital illustrations.

Tips:

Keep wireframes simple, and annotate them. The aim of a wireframe is to show the structure of a page's design - all other details come later. When presenting a wireframe to teams, try to include annotations. Annotations help to create context and quickly deliver key ideas.

Don't use wireframes for product testing. Wireframes are hardly used for product testing. Even though they help designers gather feedback on design during initial research, they don't replace actual interaction with a product (through an interactive prototype).

Continue reading part three of A Comprehensive Guide to Product Design: Design, Testing, and Post-Launch Activities.
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A Comprehensive Guide To Product Design: Research, User Analysis and Ideation (Part 2) | Adobe Blog

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In part two of A Comprehensive Guide To Product Design, I'll cover research (user research and market research), user analysis (modeling of the users), and ideation (how users interact with the product, the product structure, and UI). Once the product vision is defined, product research (which naturally includes user and market research) provides the other half of the foundation for great design.

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Self Assembly Lab

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Self-Assembly Lab Team: Skylar Tibbits, Athina Papadopoulou, Carrie McKnelly, Christophe Guberan, Jennifer Glerum Wood-Skin Team: Giulio Masotti, Stefano Baruffaldi, Susanna Todeschini, Gianluca Lo Presti, Guido Masotti Through a collaboration between MIT's Self-Assembly Lab and Wood-Skin S.r.l. a revolutionary new type of furniture has been designed.

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Car Rooftop Tent

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Sebastian Maluska creates car rooftop tent for nomadic young people

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ÉCAL graduate Sebastian Maluska has created a simple rooftop tent that can be fitted to the roof of any car. Maluska, who studied product design at Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ÉCAL) in Renens, Switzerland, created his tent for adventurous young people who want to travel on a budget, or go to remote areas.

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A group of students from London's Royal College of Art have designed a prototype coat for refugees that transforms into a tent or a sleeping bag (+ movie).

Made from paper-like synthetic material Tyvek, the Wearable Habitation coat is insulated with Mylar - a polyester material commonly used by marathon runners to keep warm.

When worn as a coat, the design resembles a baggy parka with a large hood. Pockets on the inside can be used to store passports and personal documents.

Black zips allow the coat to be completely opened out and transformed into a sleeping bag. Lightweight kite-rods can then be fed through specific seams to form a tent. Visual assembly instructions will be printed onto each garment.

Sheltersuit coat doubles as a sleeping bag for the homeless

"We spoke with Médecins Sans Frontières to get an idea of what a refugee's journey truly was," said Harriet Harris, one of the project leaders. "Our garment has three stages of use: one as a piece of clothing, one as a sleeping bag and one as a tent."

"These three aspects adapt to the conditions a refugee would experience through their two- to five-week journey," she told Dezeen.

The coat was developed by mixed teams of students from the RCA's interior design and textile courses, who were asked to develop wearable shelters for those displaced by conflict in their home countries.

The brief for the Wearable Habitation project - set by professors Harris and Graeme Brooker - stated that the coats had to be able to reconfigure into a small dwelling or tent-like structure with enough room to accommodate two to four people. Material used needed to be both cost effective and sustainable where possible.

"The original design project was run as a team-based, one-week 'hackathon' - we wanted imaginative ideas as our starting point," said Harris. "We then merged three of the strongest design proposals into one coherent proposal that is now with the factory for prototyping."

A Kickstarter campaign to fund the first batch of coats aims to raise £300,000 by the end of February, after which point the team believes it can become self-sufficient.

"Once we have the prototypes back from the factory in China we will engage with refugees and conduct site visits, plus rigorous testing to further improve the garment," Harris said. "The completed testing and prototyping of this version will inform designs for a winter version and a child version."

In response to Europe's ongoing refugee crisis, disaster relief and humanitarian projects formed one of the biggest design and architecture topics of 2015.

Last year, artist Banksy sent materials from his dismantled Dismaland theme park to the Jungle refugee camp near Calais, where it will be used to construct shelters for some of the region's 7,000 refugees.

Currently, Scottish design agency Suisse is raising funds to develop its RD-Shelter prototype, which could be rapidly deployed to house people displaced by war or natural disasters.

"Good design isn't about technologies and devices - it has a social heart and a role to play in meeting the needs of people facing impossible challenges," said Harris. "Right now, working solutions to the current crisis are limited and the suffering doesn't seem to stop."

"Whilst our wearable won't solve the whole problem it addresses a small part of it," she added.

Photography is by Joshua Tarn.
Project credits:
Design team: Gabriella Geagea Anne, Sophie Geay, Cassie Buckhart, Eve Hoffman, Anna Duthie, Jess Wang, Hailey Darling, Zara Ashby, Ruben Van Bossche and Guilia Silovy.

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RCA students design wearable dwelling for Syrian refugees

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A group of students from London's Royal College of Art have designed a prototype coat for refugees that transforms into a tent or sleeping bag.

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Hecker Guthrie 1 Balmain Street Richmond Cremorne Victoria 3121

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The Design Process

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Designing brands that make a difference

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Defining and designing brands that make a difference

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Branding - Graphic Design and LetterPress

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Branding - Graphic Design and LetterPress

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The Hungry Workshop - Design and Letterpress Melbourne

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A different kind of studio. Design and Letterpress Melbourne

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The importance of a design brief - Mike Eberly | Graphic Design

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The design brief is one of the essential parts of the design process. Starting a project without one would be a bit like proceeding to build a house without a blueprint. Although it may be possible to do, you may finish the house and then realize that you should have put your door elsewhere.

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The Design Process of an Industrial Designer

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The Design Process of an Industrial Designer

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Industrial design - the basics: Interview - FUSE - Department of Education & Training

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The Design Process of an Architect

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The design process of an architect - FUSE - Department of Education & Training

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Victorian architect Darren Naftal takes the audience through the design process. Intended as a resource for VCE students. The 31min video is a 360Mb download or can be viewed online.

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The latest in Environmental, Communication and Product Design

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The world’s most influential architecture, interiors and design magazine

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Good Thinking - Design for Good

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Good Thinking | Creative Thinking for the Community Good

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Creative Thinking for the Community Good

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Design making a difference

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Dutch Design Week kicked off in Eindhoven today, and Dezeen is in town hosting debates about whether design can tackle global issues. We've picked out 10 other worthy events and exhibitions, from an "embassy" exploring the future of food to a plastic recycling workshop.

Dezeen is media partner for Dutch Design Week, which runs from 21 to 29 October 2017 in Eindhoven.

There are over 600 events taking place across the city as part of the week-long festival, which this year has the theme "stretch".

These include Good Design for a Bad World, a series of five discussions hosted by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs, looking at whether architects and designers can provide solutions to the world's biggest problems.

But there are also many other exhibitions and events that show ways that designers are trying to make a difference, from proposing new methods of recycling to exploring sustainable approaches to construction.

"Today's world is complex and poses enormous challenges," said Martijn Paulen, director of the Dutch Design Foundation. "Designers have revolutionary ideas and innovative solutions for the future, sometimes inspiring, sometimes confrontational."

Here's our pick of the 10 best sustainably minded projects on show:

Precious Plastic Container by Dave Hakkens
Four years after first presenting his machines for recycling plastic at Dutch Design Week, designer Dave Hakkens has returned to the city to set up a mobile workspace, where he is showing designers how to make their own recycled plastic objects.

Called the Precious Plastic Container, the mobile workspace is housed in an old shipping container.

Hakkens has also using his website as an open-source platform where people can share information and tutorial videos, to help anyone make their own DIY plastic recycling workshop.
De Ontdekfabriek, Torenallee 22, 5617BD Eindhoven

W(ego) pavilion by MVRDV
Like Dezeen's Marcus Fairs, MVRDV co-founder Winy Maas is a Dutch Design Week ambassador, so the Rotterdam studio is presenting four projects for this year's event, looking at how cities will develop in the face of issues such as climate change, declining resources and rapid population growth.

Among them is this pavilion made of nine rooms that can be moved into different configurations, allowing it to adapt to the different needs of any future inhabitants - whether they be families, students or refugees.
Markt, 5611DK

Designing Sustainable Interventions by Bauhaus Universität Weimar
Seven students from Bauhaus Universität Weimar present concepts for sustainable materials and products in this exhibition.

Exhibits include a raincoat made from bio-degradable and waterproof paper, vinyl records made from bioplastic and a jacket created from self-growing textiles.
Veem, Torenallee 80, 5617BE Eindhoven

Embassies of the Future by World Design Event
There are seven "embassies" opening across Eindhoven throughout Dutch Design Week, each addressing a different issue facing humanity.

Among them is the Embassy of Climate Change, hosted by design conference What Design Can Do, which will explore ways that people can survive and adapt to global warming, and the Embassy of Food, which looks at sustainable ways of growing and processing food.

The focuses of the other five embassies are data, health, urban transformation, intimacy and, most unusual of all, robot love.
Various locations

To See the World in a Grain of Sand by Atelier NL
Dutch Design Week ambassadors Atelier NL are addressing the global sand crisis with their installation.

Studio founders Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck have sourced sand samples from all over the world and have used them to create different types of glass. They are displaying these regional varieties, to encourage glassmakers to reduce their consumption of rare white sand.
Atelier NL, Bergmannstraat 76, 5615KG Eindhoven

We are Human Rights by Studio Bernhard Lenger
Throughout the week, eight designers are teaming up with eight human-rights defence lawyers to develop proposals that could to create better situations for vulnerable people.

Organised by Studio Bernhard Lenger, the event aims to uncover the flaws in existing systems, rather then simply come up with new ideas.
Sectie-C: Hall 14, Daalakkersweg 14-36, 5641JA Eindhoven

A New Way of Recycling by Jessica den Hartog
Another designer working with recycled plastic, Jessica den Hartog has been exploring ways to make this material more attractive.

After discovering that HDPE plastic usually becomes plain grey when recycled, she has been experimenting with new techniques that might allow for colour. She presents her findings on one of the six ABN AMRO Hotspots - a series of exhibition platforms curated by Van Eijk & Van der Lubbe.
Philitelaan, 5617AB Eindhoven

People's Pavilion by Bureau SLA and Overtreders W
The venue for Dezeen's Good Design for a Bad World talk series, People's Pavilion is a temporary structure that was built using only responsibly sourced materials, all of which will be recycled once Dutch Design Week is over.

Designed by Bureau SLA and Overtreders W, the pavilion's most striking feature is its colourful shingle facade, created from waste plastic. It also boasts a wooden structure that was assembled without glue or nails - instead, tension belts and cable ties hold things in place.
Ketelhuisplein, 5617AE Eindhoven

Planti15 by Botanic Bites
Food design studio Botanic Bites is inviting Dutch Design Week visitors to sample sausages made from oyster mushroom stems - typically a waste product.

The studio is using the stems to produce sausages that are 15 times longer than usual, to demonstrate how much more food can be produced from plant protein than meat, when using the same quantity of resources.
Ketelhuisplein, 5617AE Eindhoven

Hex House by Architects for Society
Minnesota- and Amsterdam-based Architects for Society first unveiled its concept for a rapidly deployable dwelling, able to house victims of catastrophic events, in 2016. The studio is presenting its first European prototype for the first time at Dutch Design Week.

Called Hex House, the 47-square-metre modular unit is largely made of Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), which can be flat-packed and delivered by truck to a building site.

Each home is designed to cost less than £32,000 to build, but could be occupied for 50 to 70 years.
Ketelhuisplein, 5617AE Eindhoven

"Can designers save the world?"

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10 Dutch Design Week exhibitions that show designers making a difference

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Dutch Design Week kicked off in Eindhoven today, and Dezeen is in town hosting debates about whether design can tackle global issues. We've picked out 10 other worthy events and exhibitions, from an "embassy" exploring the future of food to a plastic recycling workshop.

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