Dutch Design Week 2013: the aluminium structures of these cabinets by Rotterdam studio Minale-Maeda poke through their plywood skins to create a coloured grid on the inside and dashed patterns on the outside.

The Wrong Colour Furniture System by Minale-Maeda has a structure made of anodised aluminium, with teeth in the bars that bite into the plywood panels and secure them in place once slotted together.

Each bar is colour-coded in cyan, magenta and yellow according to its orientation. The ends of the bars pierce the plywood panels where they are attached, creating a distinctive grid pattern on the outside with vertical cyan dashes and horizontal magenta ones.

The yellow components are only visible behind the legs and inside the cabinets, framing each module with a yellow square.

"The name Wrong Colour comes from the idea that it is like an X-ray of a piece of furniture, processed with imaging technologies like in baggage scanners to highlight differences in densities between materials and better separate them when they overlap," Minale-Maeda told Dezeen. "It follows the idea that the project is about transparency in production and construction, and the colours are crucial in highlighting the separate elements."

"The other reason to have three different colours is that they serve as a guide in the assembly of the piece, because each plane has a separate colour so it aids in picking the right parts for each panel and later in assembling the panels into a box," they added.

The modular units can be stacked in different configurations and can be ordered with or without doors direct from the designers. "There is great flexibility in materials and colours that we are experimenting with, so custom schemes is one direction we are developing and the other is having a greater variety of module sizes," they said.

Wrong Colour Furniture System was nominated for the Dutch Design Awards and is on show alongside the other shortlisted projects as part of Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven until Sunday.

"Many influences converge in this piece of furniture, including those of Rietveld, Mondriaan and Japanese culture," commented the selection committee. "It is a modular system turned inside out in an interesting way."

Naples-born Mario Minale and Tokyo-born Kuniko Maeda founded their studio in 2006 after graduating together from the Design Academy Eindhoven. They often highlight the method of construction a key aesthetic component in their work and past projects include plywood furniture joined with 3D-printed connectors and a collection that can be downloaded and produced locally.