Design Museum Den Bosch – Vrouwen Als Technologie (2025)
Type: Exhibition Design
Design and concept: Setareh Noorani and Jelmer Teunissen
Graphic Design: nm studio / Nicole Martens
Client: Design Museum Den Bosch
Build: CREATHINGS, LevTec
Photography: Tom Philip Janssen
The theme Women as Technology is more relevant than ever—yet as old as written history itself.
The exhibition explores this theme through stories and objects that can feel both alienating and surprisingly familiar. Its aim is to offer visitors a new way of seeing the world with women, and to draw connections between design and the histories that accompany it.
Women have been systematically overlooked, excluded, or had to outperform others just to gain recognition. These underlying structures still shape our daily lives—from our workplaces to the cities we live in. At the same time, this is not a singular story; it is shaped by a multitude of voices. The exhibition makes space for these voices: activist and agenda-setting, but also connective, welcoming, and celebratory.
In the spatial design, we zoom in on the dynamics of the city, with the visitor cast as flâneuse (or flâneur)—in contrast, for example, to the suburbs. Suburbia evokes associations with The Stepford Wives—a segregated world where mothers are confined to the home. The city, by contrast, has historically been a place where women (like Virginia Woolf once did) encounter one another and move through intellectual and social spaces.
The city serves as a metaphor for this polyphony within the design. We highlight the layering and non-linearity of the narrative by translating urban principles into the exhibition space: indoor and outdoor areas, streets, façades and rhythms, glimpses and overlaps, high- and low-rise structures, intersections and urban meeting points. The spatial arrangement repeats certain structures to weave cross-connections between themes and spaces.
We reuse existing walls and vitrines from earlier exhibitions, supplementing them with lighting design and contrasting surfaces in various textures and heights. The colours are bold and striking—no pastels or dainty hues. They amplify the contrasts in the narrative, balancing between warm and cold, alienating and inviting.
