Jaap Knevel
Jaap Knevel (he/his) is a wayfinding designer specialising in maps, pictograms, guides, and archives and their cultural complexities. Initially a student and designer at Mijksenaar, he now operates as an independent studio under the name Tokyo Monorail.
In 2020, he co-created the Future Materials Bank at the Jan van Eyck Academy, a crowd-sourced online archive that promotes sharing knowledge of sustainable materials between artists and designers across the world. As of 2024, he also co-curates the Living Library, a two-year research and education project about regional biomaterials at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe.
As an educator, he has hosted over 250 workshops on wayfinding and graphic design for schools such as the Willem de Kooning Academy, Amsterdam University of the Arts, Central Saint Martins UAL, and ITESO Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara in México.
He holds a BA in design from the department of Media and Culture at Design Academy Eindhoven (The Netherlands) and received his MFA from the department of Visual Communication at Konstfack (Sweden).
