The story of MacGuffin begins, improbably, with a Vietnamese water buffalo. In 2015, Dutch art historians Kirsten Algera and Ernst van der Hoeven were traveling in Vietnam when their moped collided with one. While recovering, they decided to make a magazine. They had been collaborating for years — at KPN Art & Design, on the urban nature journal Club Donny, on textile projects with Hmong weavers — and had grown increasingly frustrated with the design world's obsession with star designers and commercial novelty. They wanted to talk about objects differently: not as products to be sold but as plot devices that set stories in motion.
They borrowed the concept from Alfred Hitchcock. A MacGuffin, in cinema, is the object that drives the plot — the briefcase, the stolen necklace, the secret formula — even though the object itself doesn't matter. Algera and van der Hoeven flipped this: in their magazine, the object matters enormously. Each biannual issue orbits a single thing — a bed, a window, a rope, a sink, a cabinet, a ball, a pair of trousers — and explores every story it generates: historical, cultural, political, personal, visual.
After pitching to uninterested investors, they adopted Tina Brown's mantra: "If you don't have a budget, have a point of view." A grant from the Dutch Fund for Creative Industries got them started. The first issue, on beds, sold out in two weeks. The Stack Awards named MacGuffin Magazine of the Year. The publication has since expanded into exhibitions, workshops, and educational programs at design schools across Europe.
Each issue is oversized, heavy, and thick — designed to be collected like a book rather than discarded like a periodical. The contributors range from designers and historians to short-story writers and collectors. The result is a magazine that treats ordinary objects with extraordinary attention, revealing that the most familiar things in our lives are also the most mysterious.
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