We’re thrilled that Photosynthesising Flowerpots has been selected for Jaarboek Design 2024–2026, the first Yearbook of Design in Flanders.

Published by Designpunt, the expertise centre for design culture and Design Museum Gent, the yearbook brings together projects and essays that capture a design field in motion — crossing disciplines and engaging with the social, ecological, technological and cultural questions of our time.

More than an overview, this first edition sets out to create a collective memory for design culture in Flanders and Brussels. Selected by independent expert juries following an open call, the projects reflect several recurring concerns: circular and regenerative design, social engagement, activism, systems thinking, material experimentation, and the growing attention given to slowness, care and interdependence.

Within this landscape, Photosynthesising Flowerpots is presented as an example of regenerative design. In her text on the project, Elien Haentjens explores how technology can become a symbiotic design partner in bio-inspired making processes. Working with cyanobacteria, biomineralisation and a 3D-printed biomix, the flowerpots remain open to growth, change and care rather than conforming to a fixed industrial outcome.

The project also resonates throughout the yearbook’s wider reflections. In Design and Entangled Time, Zsuzsanna Böröcz considers the flowerpots through biological and more-than-human temporalities, where design creates conditions for living and material processes to co-evolve. In Designing for the Symbiocene, Fabienne Beernaert situates the project within a shift towards reciprocity, interconnectedness and ecological responsibility.

We’re excited to see our living flowerpots become part of this first edition — and of a broader conversation about how design can move from controlling living systems towards collaborating with them.

Discover Jaarboek Design 2024–2026

Published by Designpunt / Design Museum Gent
Project text by Elien Haentjens