Looking back at 2024
Today the Creative Industries Fund NL is publishing its 2024 annual report. We look back on a year in which we made new plans for the future. The plans give space to current themes, such as circularity and artificial intelligence, and lead to other collaborations. They also consider the feasibility of implementing our programmes and grant schemes, which has been under ever more pressure in recent years due to a sharply increasing number of applications but no corresponding increase in the budget.
Executive director Syb Groeneveld: ‘Based on our 2025-2028 policy plan, our grant schemes have been renewed over the past year. Unfortunately, the manageability of the volume of applications plays an important role here; we have tried to explain this to the field as best we could. But, naturally, the development of the professional fields of design, architecture and digital culture is still very much central. For a strong sector, it is important that there is room for creating other perspectives and exploring the possibilities of new technology, for example. But also for questioning the spatial domain in order to achieve innovative solutions in relation to issues such as the housing challenge and climate crisis. We have seen in recent years that it is also very important for the sector to encourage larger collaborations. We have done so, for instance, with Innovationlabs, the programme that ended in 2024, and which emerged during the Covid period to explore how the sector could become more agile and resilient. From this partnership, we learned that not only collaboration is important, but research is also valuable to achieve knowledge development for the sector. That is why we started a collaboration with Regieorgaan SIA last year. The aim is to place artistic design research on an equal footing between science and the design sector. And similarly with our new Artistic & Design Research for Immersive Experiences Grant Scheme, where we encourage major collaborations, in this case between makers, producers, institutions and researchers. Forming these kinds of coalitions is going to be very important for the design sector in the coming years.’
For a strong sector, it is important that there is room for creating other perspectives and exploring the possibilities of new technology, for example. – Syb Groeneveld
looking back at 2024
makers’ stories
We show the power of design in five stories. Stories about talent development and the role of cultural institutions in this process, about challenging dominant perspectives, about the value of cultural exchange and about the creation of a collective heroic epic. We hear from the following makers: Gabriel Fontana, Playgrounds, Nadia Piet, HOH Architecten, Nathalie Hartjes and the makers, curators, scientists and community partners with whom they collaborated.
numbers
Besides the video portraits, the annual report contains infographics that provide insight into the distribution of the total available budget of € 20.1 million, and the results achieved. In so doing, we supported makers, designers and cultural institutions alike. With 2410 applications processed and 1091 grants awarded, last year’s percentage of applications receiving grants came to 45.3%. You can see the annual report here.
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