In the streets of Vienna’s 20th Brigittenau district, the 2021 Vienna Design Week has come to life: a platform for experimentation and exchange, in the name of design. With a specific soul: Social, Original, Useful and Fair (to the environment). The ultimate goal? To create a series of design-oriented interventions that leave a trace to encourage future developments, even when the spotlight of the Design Week is turned off.
Diary note of @magalinimarco
The 15th Vienna Design Week has just come to an end. This edition was particularly important due to a change in the helm: Lilli Hollein, one of the founders and recently General Director of the MAK (click here to read our interview) is stepping down from her role as director, to be taken over by Gabriel Roland (click here to read our interview). A move that seems to reinforce the spirit of the event: Design Week is not conceived as a showcase of ready-to-buy objects, but rather as a real widespread laboratory, aimed at developing thoughts and experimental approaches, in an attitude of strong cohesion and interchange. A bit like what happens in the scientific world, where the baton is passed from mind to mind, to be then developed and refined. The place of this debate is extended to the whole city, but has its own nerve centre: the 20th Brigittenau district. As in every edition, the design week identifies a specific area of the city, with the aim of turning the spotlight on it to show not only its most prestigious places, but also those that are more unknown, vacant and controversial. And it is precisely in these temporary and provisional spaces that the minds of creative people are activated to find new lifeblood thanks to incessant experimentation. Under the banner of 4 macro-characteristics that well describe the soul (SOUL) of #VDW21: SOCIAL, ORIGINAL, USEFUL and LOYAL.
We explored the #VDW21 in search of the most interesting projects, to stimulate new and additional creative developments.
Vienna Design Week, Focus District Brigittenau – Ph. Bueronardin/Niko Havranek
SOCIAL
Design must be at the service of communities: anticipating, capturing and responding to their needs. Even a simple infrastructure, such as a staircase that makes an abandoned area accessible again (Vienna’s High Line), or an experimental format to create pop-up outdoor university classrooms, or a machine to get people talking by addressing the stigma of psychological stress due to the pandemic, are interventions by designers.
ORIGINAL
The designer, just like the artist, is a keen observer of society. He establishes a profound observation with it, which then becomes an original dialogue to build a whole new future. As in the case of the mutidisciplinary creations of Benjamin Nagy and Anton Defant, or the “radical changes” of the wooden furniture brand Trewit 1879, or the eclectic collages designed by PABUKU for Moduletto.
USEFUL
Vienna Design Week is not only research and experimentation. It also offers a series of useful responses to people’s real needs. Like the everyday objects selected by the Viennese studio Vandasye and collected in the “Design Everyday” installation or the 24 projects by young Polish designers (“Care, Connect, Change”) that respond to the social and ecological challenges of the present. Great attention is also given to the theme of food (production, sale, consumption), with dedicated talks and an exhibition curated by Katharina Dankl.
LOYAL (WITH NATURE)
One of the key themes for reflection is certainly that of sustainability: understood as loyalty and protection of the Planet and its inhabitants from which everything comes to life. At the centre of the investigation are some innovative sustainable materials, such as the one invented by Studio Spezial by recycling the screw caps of Vöslauer water bottles (from which they made the “Water Table”), or the one created in collaboration between designer Barbara Gollackner and chef Martin Kilga by recycling industrial and personal food scraps (resulting in a range of bowls, plates and cutlery printed with 3D technology). And the experimental projects of the “Design in Gesellschaft” collective which, among other things, invent technological tools to capture the sounds of vegetation.
