Scape Agency selected for What if Lab: Circular Stations

What if Lab believes designers can be instrumental in innovation, through their creativity and different ways of thinking

In today’s world things change rapidly and our traditional and existing solutions do not work in in our ever changing society. We need to look at things differentily and be inventive to come up with new solutions. Designers can respond quickly to these changes and offer a unique perspective on modern day problems.

What if Lab brings the business world in contact with the design world so that they can tackle the current issues together and come up with innovative answers. They organize specific labs for specific problems and select designers to come up with new answers.

Past results offer no guarantees for the future, but they do provide proof that nothing is impossible!

In December they challenged desigers to come up with solutions for the railway companies in the Netherlands; NS Stations and ProRail. The Dutch Government wants to make the transition to a circular economy by the year 2050. The Netherlands has a vast trainwork with a lot of stations throughout the country. As such they play a major part in this transition. Together with What If Lab, NS Stations, ProRail and Bureau Spoorbouwmeester put out an open call to all designers, artist and architects in the Netherlands to come up with ideas to achieve a fully circular railway in 2050.

From all the applicants Scape Agency was among the ten selected designers to try and answer the question how NS Stations and ProRail can create circular products. Other designers that were selected were; AtelierNL, Studio Tjeerd Veenhoven, Welling Architects, Studio Mixtura, Tom van Soest, De Architecten Cie, Bygg Architecture & Design, Rombout Frieling Lab and Studio RAP.

All participants were invited to follow several masterclasses and develop their concepts within ten weeks. In April the ten will present their ideas to a jury. The jury will decide which three will get to develop their ideas further and present it at Dutch Design Week 2020.