Open Set is an independent platform that promotes design and art practice as social and political interaction.

Our organisation began as a Dutch Design summer school in 2012 and has grown to include a broad spectrum of year-round activities.

Devised to enrich an active studio practice or ongoing education, our programmes are aimed at makers and thinkers

that evaluate or re-affirm their operating methods and positions in the professional landscape, and

who seek a deeper understanding of emergent discourses, and those who want to take their work in new, unexpected directions.

We bring together emerging figures from design, arts and adjacent fields in order to expand the dialogue on the most pressing themes in current theory and practice.

The Open Set learning environment is site-specific, intimate, non-competitive and peer-led. We are committed to openness toward diverse literacies, visual rhetorics and traditions, and personal backgrounds. Open Set is a space that resists the illusion of objectivity or superiority of any knowledge, method, form of argumentation or aesthetics.

Open Set connects the visions of designers with partners, presentation platforms, communities and audiences.

Over 300 participants and more than 50 Open Set mentors have contributed to programmes in the Netherlands and abroad. Learn more about these cross-disciplinary adventures in our online reader.

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Apply for The Summer Camp for Radical Hope, 3-14 July 2023! Deadline – May 8, 2023.