VIENNA DESIGN WEEK - Vienna – A City Full of Design

The aim of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK is to show and enable people to experience the many-faceted creative work in the fields of product, furniture and industrial design, but also positions of experimental design. After a successful first festival last year, the work of numerous designers from Austria and abroad will also be presented this October with a growing programme of events.

International Design in Vienna

In cooperation with many partners – from Vienna museums to production and retail companies to designers from all over the world – the whole of Vienna will become a platform and showplace of design throughout the ten days. VIENNA DESIGN WEEK therefore also has less the character of a trade fair but instead offers a variety of venues and approaches specific to Vienna. International but localised, that is the motto – whereby this year, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe, the international element is particularly in the forefront. The invitation to designers and cooperation projects from the region is intended to make a contribution to the long overdue progress in networking in the field of design.

Discussing and Celebrating Design
Here "design" in no way means only an external aspect of the "shaping" of individual objects. Design has been and is much more an important field in the production of culture: it shapes our material culture, our everyday life and our consumer world, it influences our lifestyles and fashions and most fundamentally our aesthetic sense and judgements. This wide-ranging impact is a reason both to celebrate design and to examine it critically, and VIENNA DESIGN WEEK has made both of these its mission.


Time for Experiments

The festival aims to reveal creative and production processes and encourage experimental work on the spot. It also presents and promotes design that in the first instance withdraws from the scheme of utility value and functionality in order to create awareness and pose questions or also simply just to have fun. The exploration of materials, mood values and the interaction between people and objects is at the centre of design and should have its assured place at the festival.

International Festival and Viennese Culture Event

With exhibitions, venue-specific installations, theme specials, discussion events, a programme of films and, of course, enough opportunity to party, VIENNA DESIGN WEEK is not only an attraction for the international design scene but most explicitly also aims to interest and appeal to a wide public audience of Viennese and visitors to Vienna. This year VIENNA DESIGN WEEK goes into the second round with the wish and the aim to take up a firm place on the international festival scene and at the same time become a fixed early-autumn cultural event in Vienna.

Press Information
www.viennadesignweek.at/press
Further Information
www.viennadesignweek.at

Press Contact
juicy pool. communication
Franziska Gerner
Sprengersteig 21
A -1160 Vienna
T: +43 1 481 54 54 50
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E: franziska.gerner@juicypool.com
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Tulga Beyerle, Thomas Geisler and Lilli Hollein, who set up the Neigungsgruppe Design in 2006, describe as follows their joint goals: to define more precisely the term design in Austria, to stimulate a discourse and examination of this theme, to illustrate the position held by design in the field of tension between culture and business, all in all to convey and spread their enthusiasm for design.

With “DESIGN 06 – dialogues about design” based on the theme “Time Zones” – these three curators, together with the University of Applied Arts Vienna, initiated an interdisciplinary conference series that was continued 2007 under the title DESIGN 07, this time focussing on the theme “The Middle”. The Neigungsgruppe Design is also responsible for the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK, which runs from 2 to 12 October 2008 during which visitors and others can follow “paths of passion” (Passionswege) that help them discover selected places and designers in the inner city of Vienna, and in this way to pursue their passion for design.

This release was published on openPR.