Climate change causes the summers in the Netherlands to get hotter and hotter. How will we deal with this in the future? ‘Cooling is not the only way to deal with the heat’, says Lenneke Kuijer. This is why she broadened the topic to summer comfort. Kuijer is an assistant professor at the TU Eindhoven, where she uses a Veni-grant to do research on summer comfort. She encourages her students to ‘think in a more extreme way about the future of daily comfort in a hotter climate’. This original approach has so far provided concepts of a cooling patch, a living shirt and a portable outside workplace. These ‘triggering concepts’ are not meant as solutions, but to facilitate discussion and point to alternative responses, for example: ‘Green in the public spaces is actually very important for comfort in the city.’
The living shirt consists of clothing in which living plants have been incorporated. The plants gain nutrition and water from the sweat of the wearer. The concept is meant to open discussions about our relation to sweat and ways of professional dressing in hot weather. The living shirt was an extraordinary addition to the Dutch Design Week of 2021.
If you would like to know more about these innovative solutions for the heated future, you can meet Lenneke Kuijer and ask her about summer comfort on the 31th of May at the innovation market at TEKNOWLOGY.
