This special issue aims to reflect on the origins and conceptualizations of Dutch Design in times of globalization, migration and multiculturalism. As a discursive construction, the term ‘Dutch Design’ refers to the corpus of artefacts construed as ‘typically’ Dutch and as ‘Design’ by a homonymous discourse. One of its distinguishing characteristics is the implicit reliance on essentialist theories of national culture. These accounts usually start from a pre-established set of factors supposedly constitutive of Dutch cultural identity—e.g. Calvinism, the artificially constructed and densely populated Dutch landscape, the political Polder Model, openness—and proceed to examine only artefacts that are arguably products of this narrowly defined Dutch culture: those considered e.g. conceptual, unconventional, sustainable, and sober.

Consequently, the canonical discourse is unable to correspond to Dutch Design’s empirical cultural and material diversity. On the one hand, although today the Netherlands counts among its citizens numerous immigrants and minority groups, the canonical discourse nevertheless advances from the presupposition of a homogenous ‘native’ population. On the other hand, Dutch Design has become disconnected from its original geographical and national boundaries, including foreign designers and designs both at home and abroad. Thus, in an age of globalization, mass migration and multiculturalism, the history of design in the Netherlands must reach beyond romantic but ultimately bankrupt notions of traditional communities.

Nevertheless, exchanging the received canon for a ‘multicultural’ or a ‘vernacular’ one is not an alternative, since that mostly entails the addition of excluded voices and things to the same grand narrative. Accordingly, this SI does not offer a counter-canon, but welcomes contributions from a variety of backgrounds proposing critical revisions of Dutch Design while exploring its transnational material and social entanglements.