In the beginning of the nineties, a group of young dutch designers was presented in Milaan under the name of DROOG. Their designs were immediately recognized as something new. Anti-glamour, sober yet funny, and all telling a story or commenting on society. For a while, DROOG design even became synonymous with dutch design. Founders of this collective are Gijs Bakker and Renny Ramakers.

Many of the early DROOG designs found their way to galleries and museums all over the world. They became icons, sometimes crossing the line between art and design. One of the very first to acquire them was the museum of modern art in New York.

Since the beginning, Droog has evolved. It has become more of a thinktank under the name of drooglab, which aims to detect global trends in design, and then reflect on those trends from a new perspective.

CREDITS: Director: Noud Holtman, Camera: Pierre Rezus, Sound: Bram Meindersma, Carla van der Meijs, Editing: Dominique Kools, Kleurcorrectie: Maurik de Ridder, Music Sound Design: Big Orange, Commissioning editor Submarine: Geert van de Wetering, Producer Submarine: Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen, Research assist: Liselot Francken, Produced by Submarine, Commissioned by DutchDFA

In 2002, Maarten Baas graduated with Smoke at the famous Design Academy in Eindhoven. Smoke is a series in which design classics are scorched with a blow torch and then sealed with epoxy – a project which gained him worldwide attention.

His studio is based in a farm in the South of Holland where he works with a small group of international craftsmen – a talented and diverse community in which each member contributes something unique to the final product.

In 2009, Baas was named Designer of the Year at Design Miami. To Baas’s great satisfaction, it was precisely this personal, small-scale and collaborative approach which the jury applauded.

In Milan in 2009, Baas presented his project Real Time: a series of videos depicting hyper-physical representations of time. The project questions our ambiguous relationship with time in our profoundly temporal world.

CREDITS Director: Sarah Domogala, Camera: Aage Hollander, Sound: Eric Leek, Editing: Maurik de Ridder, Music Sound Design: Jesse Koolhaas, Research: Bas Geelen, Commissioning editor Submarine: Geert van de Wetering, Producer Submarine: Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen, Production assist: Liselot Francken, Produced by Submarine, Commissioned by DutchDFA