Design Map · Eindhoven
Better That
Graduation project by Ayşenur (Aisha) Dağdelen at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
A dining table sits at the centre of the room among other pieces of domestic furniture. Its shapes and details have been reinterpreted from furniture Dağdelen’s father once made in Dutch factories. When he arrived in the Netherlands as a guest labourer from Turkey, his work was simply called factory labour, never craft. The designer grew up surrounded by these objects without knowing much about the hands that built them. Fragments of unspoken family history are reconstructed, taking the shape of furniture built of aluminium and wood. These two materials are brought into structural dialogue, traditional and modern techniques interwoven, lending a sense of intergenerational embrace. As the project unfolded, the making became a platform for father-daughter dialogue. On this auto-ethnographic exercise, Dağdelen questions why she gets to call herself a designer when he was never called a carpenter. At ‘Better That’, they both get a seat at the table.