Amsterdam native Renny Ramakers made her first visit to Michigan Thursday as a Penny Stamps distinguished speaker. The co-founder of the design company Droog, meaning “dry” in Dutch, Ramakers presented her business’s work to the people of Ann Arbor. However, her designs were the complete opposite of “dry.”
Eclectic and energetic, Ramakers creates functional pieces of art and open design spaces for others to access.
“Droog is a paradox,” Ramakers said during her presentation. “It’s taking what is simple and making it not so simple.”
Whether you’re a tea-drinking human or even a tiny goldfish, Droog considers all beings. Projects like House of Droog, a modern Amsterdam exhibit that flips the ideas of a hotel or Studio Droog, the birthplace for the adornments, products and furnishings created by Droog designers (including a restaurant design for a fish tank) all carry the same theme: “function and fiction.”
“It is out of the box and playful, but very serious,” Ramakers said in an interview with The Michigan Daily.
With a strong focus in contemporary design, she presented on many of her impressive projects through the years, such as the New York-based Museum of Sex’s exhibit “Splendor in the Grass,” a camping-themed, hands-on experience that educates patrons on eroticism and sexuality.
Starting up in 1993, Ramakers’s “Droog” created the platform for further projects like “The New Original” in Shenzhen, China and “Open House” in the suburbs of New York City. With inspiration from the common people and an urge for a domestic change, Ramakers found the perfect project that she titled “Design+Desires”.
Design+Designers, Ramakers said, was about depth.
“How can we (the design team) create a city in which the diversity of desires could be brought together?” she asked.
The company started their efforts in the impoverished city of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, in which they hoped to improve living standards artistically.
“People over there sent us away … They didn’t believe we could be any meaning for them,” Ramakers said.
Nonetheless, Ramakers and her team were determined to start up a social and urban project, thus leading to Social City — an online space in which people can create avatars, shape their living situations and share their dreams and wants for their perfect lifestyle. With more ideas and people on board, Social City hopes to transform these dreams into a reality.
“I wanted to bring people’s desires into Social City,” Ramakers said. “Some don’t have the imagination to think further than things around them. So, we as designers need to be creative, go further and be innovative.”
When asked where she got her inspirations, Ramakers said she didn’t know.
“Everything can inspire me,” she said. “An article, a product, a movement, something.” But she also believes that “imitation can be inspiration” and she hopes that people are also getting inspired by Droog projects. These inspirations were evident to the audience when Ramakers displayed her vibrant and eccentric designs on the screen.
“I want people to understand why I am doing what I am doing … celebrating imperfection,” she said.
And although Droog and Design+Desires feels like an idea beyond imagination, Renny Ramakers proved that with resilience and passion, any exotic design can be brought to be a real-life function.