Wry & Dry: Humor in Dutch Design and How it Got There
Lecture by Tracy Metz

Dutch designers have a wry, often irreverent take on the world and the objects with which they populate it. This attitude allows Dutch design to be both functional and fun. The government has created policies and an infrastructure that foster design and the business world has embraced it. Tracy Metz, author and journalist in the Netherlands and Loeb Fellow ’07 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, will talk about the Netherlands’ material culture and the role of design in its creative economy.

About Tracy Metz
Tracy Metz has been a journalist with the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad for twenty years, where she writes about architecture, landscape and urban design. She is also an international correspondent for Architectural Record and a contributor to Metropolis, Domus and Graphis. In both the Netherlands and the US she regularly lectures on topical planning issues ranging from leisure to water management. In addition to her work as a journalist, Metz has started moving into the sphere of policy-making and research. She was recently appointed as visiting scholar at the Netherlands Institute for Spatial Research, where she will be writing a book on the revitalization of downtowns in the US and Europe. She recently became a member of the Council on Rural Affairs, an independent advisory council to the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality.