From February 22 to May 25, the Design Museum Den Bosch in ‘s-Hertogenbosch presents the exhibition Trans Europe Design Express – a journey through five design collections. The invitation by the museum’s director Timo de Rijk to jointly organise a trans-European design exhibition was accepted by the Triennale Milano, the mudac Lausanne, the Domaine de Boisbuchet, the Designmuseum Danmark and the Design Museum Brussels, each of which contributed 25 representative works from their collections to initiate a European dialogue on their missions and the role of design in our time.

The uniqueness of this event – five design museums hosted by a sixth – is of historic importance in this field. In addition to an exhibition and a discussion on practices and collections, these museums together lay the foundations for a broader reflection on the links between coexistence, action and dialogue, themes crucial to the survival and evolution of museums, especially those dedicated to design. This reflection includes public-private relations, (in)dependency, institutional fraternity in diversity and the revival of a collective ‘we’ as opposed to the solitary, authoritarian ‘I’.

At the Design Museum Brussels, the presentation, which has now become the Plastic Design Collection, has evolved over the past 10 years from a colourful aesthetic approach to an overview of the possibilities, challenges and problems of this family of materials and the technologies used to produce them. The museum preserves and promotes the fragile heritage of material culture that plastics represent. The collection looks beyond the utopia of the all-plastic 1960s and encompasses the changing identities these materials have claimed or acquired over the decades.
‘From the democratic and easily accessible object to the toxic waste of endless overconsumption, through innovation and dematerialisation, the Design Museum Brussels depicts scenarios for the future by looking at the past and questioning the present’ say director Arnaud Bozzini, and Cristina Bargna, head of collection. It is this approach that is shared in the exhibition on show at the Design Museum Den Bosch from now until the end of May.