When Daphna Isaacs and Laurens Manders opened their firm in Eindhoven back in 2008, as young graduates fresh from the Design Academy, the local design landscape was starting to change. The following year Li Edelkoort left the school’s artistic direction after working to renew it since 1999. In the same year, Gijs Bakker also completed his adventure with Droog Design, the collective he founded with his wife Renny Ramakers in 1993. Two of the pillars of Dutch design were shifting, opening up a decade of changes for the youthful Dutch creative scene in search of a new maturity and identity.

Our two designers, now 35 and 33 respectively, grew steadily and coherently over those 10 years. Step by step, they achieved their goal of combining applied and visual arts in the best tradition of Dutch design, while also working on poetic and industrial projects. From their early exhibitions with the Dutch Invertuals collective (as members since 2009) to the family of Tafelstukken lamps (2009, produced two years later by Cappellini), the Dutch duo has revealed a growing maturity in extending the range of technical, formal and functional challenges it tackles on different levels and for different clients. Recent creations have included the C-Chair concept to mark 100 years of Poltrona Frau and an accessible and democratic stool for Monoprix.

At the last Dutch Design Week this attitude was confirmed by no fewer than four exhibits. They started with an interior design (by Dutch Invertuals) for DroomParken (a series of Dutch parks offering low-cost outdoor holidays), seeking to bring the comfort of a real home into the spartan space of a bungalow. “We tried to bring the outside inside,” they explain. “We designed a metal bucket as a washing bowl. The ceramic kitchen looks like Corten and we used materials that are earth-like.” Then there was their indispensable contribution for Dutch Invertuals, which they always see as stimulating new ideas, insights and growth. “We don’t consider the other designers as competitors. Being together with Dutch Invertuals made us realise that you have to collaborate to be more powerful.” This year they designed the installation of the “Fundamentals” retrospective, the most ambitious ever with 45 designers (and 800 objects) invited to show off the fundamentals of their creative process and design a container.

Finally, Daphna Laurens researched the uses of linoleum for Forbo Flooring Systems (an assignment by Baars & Bloemhoff). They designed a whole family of office fittings, so enlarging the material’s potential in the collective imagination, which tends to associate it with flooring for schools and hospitals. Lamps, organisers, tools, lazy working chair. Practically everything but the desk top: that would have been a banal challenge and it held no appeal for Daphna Laurens.