NAGOYA--"I designed a new way of living," says Jill Marie Hanssen, by way of introduction. She is a 1999 product design graduate from the Academy of Visual Arts Maastricht, so the hyperbole may have been the unintended result of speaking in English, her third language, but I took the 22-year-old Dutch designer's statement at face value.

Sitting on her product in her open-ended cubicle in the maze of "Design Next Generation 2000: The Dutch New Innovators," an exhibition at the Nagoya International Design Center at NADYA Park, I was electrified by her will and the power of her simple concept: a gray stuffed nine-panel felt carpet punctured with holes at regular intervals. To go in the holes are round-bottomed ceramic cups, with a sort of upside-down felt cozy for holding hot drinks, and larger containers, maybe for nuts. A turned wooden bowl with a rounded base completes her innovative room set. It is astounding that no Japanese designer has come up with such an elegant solution to the increased use of Western flooring.

Of course, this young woman hasn't designed a new way of living single-handedly. She had help. The exhibition features six different teams of mostly young Dutch designers, part of a new design movement that has surprised and delighted the world since the early 1990s.

Seen from above, the walled, walk-through exhibition looks like a 1950s Home of the Future, or a sitcom set. But from within, each of the 24 "rooms" presents a different vision of the future, with a different emphasis. Unlike most Next Generation designs, though, these are eminently and inherently comfortable. Even Paula Harsanyi's acupressure clothing, of Lycra, tubes, sponges and foam, which is texturally the slickest of the presented objects, gains credibility by the fact that it is conceptually grounded. According to her product description, she is interested in "the dermatomes, the feeling lanes of human beings." The original idea was to apply massage oil underneath the sponges of an acupressure pajama; in any case, it's not fashion for fashion's sake.

Nor is the work of another young woman exhibitor, who is now fabulously famous in the Netherlands for a sober design solution to a social problem. Required by their religion to cover their heads, Muslim girls had been unable to participate in sports at school because their traditional head coverings were deemed dangerous. Dating a Turkish boy, Cindy van den Bremen came into contact with the problem, and solved it by creating sporty head coverings that even I would be happy to wear. The Dutch media has made her product famous because it confronts social prejudice. Would a Japanese fashion designer approach, for example, Korean traditional dress? Would the media investigate?

All together, 60 individuals are represented in a complex exhibition which divides them into six categories. They range from recent graduates like Chris Slutter, designer of the 2.5-cm-deep framed rubber cupboard, "Drubb," to the well-established Droog Design which dared to challenge the dominant culture, and more importantly, seek ways to actually market the challenge. Particularly meaningful to Japan could be YD+1 (Young Designers and Industry), a joint project of the Netherlands Design Institute and the Sandberg Institute, in which young designers are paired with major, often staid European companies, and asked to share their very well-conceived dreams for a better designed future.

Dutch design of the past decade has been labeled "ecological" but it is more -- and less -- than that. Created to solve specific problems, these types of objects stretch the boundaries of technology, materials, craftsmanship and social and market acceptance. Many of them just happen to satisfy some ecological needs along the way.

"That was my first Rado watch," says Marvin Fernandes, pointing at a product poster depicting a baby with a Rado watch attached to the bottom of its pacifier.

Fernandes, who worked with four other young men on a series of outlandish and brilliantly viable timepieces for Rado, speaks in the past tense, but in fact the production schedule has not yet been set. The pacifier watch is just a photo/drawing collage, but it's enough to make you smile and say, "Why not?"

Anne-Marie Jetten, Bruno van Hooijdonk and Susann Rittermann did the same with linoleum, that despised, scuffed and forgotten material of our childhoods. Along with linoleum bricks, bowls and clothes, they are presenting, straight from a Dutch bakery, linoleum cookies (made, believe it or not, of the same ingredients as linoleum: linseed and pine nuts). Rittermann, who was born in East Germany, says, "The Dutch are very straightforward. Everything has a meaning." To sample meaningful design in Japan, visit this exhibition and feast. First come, first served.