Industrial Design

Bas van de Poel is the innovation director and co-founder of Modem, an office for design and innovation dedicated to envisioning how forward-thinking companies and institutions can thrive amidst exponential change.

Modem approaches this mission as a think tank, collaborating with academic partners like Harvard GSD, MIT, and UC Berkeley, and as a design studio, working with clients such as OpenAI, Google, and Chanel. Prior to founding Modem, Bas served as Creative Director at IKEA’s future-living lab, SPACE10, where he led large-scale digital transformation and sustainability programs.

https://modemworks.com
@modem.works
@basvandepoel

The event will take place on Friday, March 28, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. in Kaskadenfoyer 5.K04, Toni Areal. Bas van de Pool will give his lecture online, followed by time for an open discussion. Interested participants are warmly welcome.

Dirty Hands is an invitation to explore new ways of working—ways that are hands-on and reflective, experimental and critical, proactive and self-aware, deeply rooted in practice. It embraces contradiction, the tension between creation and consequence, and the need for design to evolve.

This lecture series explores the entangled relationships between design, ecology, technology, and society. It highlights the urgent need for approaches that bridge the gap between planetary limitations and human action.

We invite thinkers and makers to navigate these uncertainties with us—to get their hands dirty, share their practice, and rethink what design can and can't do.