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Everything is design. As much as the future is accidental, it must be designed or ultimately designed.
This year Austin Design Week adopts the theme “Future” and recognizes the action of creating the future – instead of simply waiting for it. From November 8-12, attendees will be invited to 80 free events across Austin and online through panels, classes, workshops and mixers.
“We chose this term ‘future’ as this idea [that] we don’t just change or evolve, things don’t just happen around us, ”says ADW co-founder and co-organizer Danielle Barnes. “As designers and creatives, we can help shape the future that we want to see. It can look very different. It’s not just one future; It has many different places it could go. “
In the sixth year ADW expects more than 2,000 participants. The goal in the founding year 2016 was to represent the diversity of the design community, to invite cross-media collaboration and to share tools between artists and designers without gatekeeping.
True to that vision, it was planned to coincide and make way for other creative events in November, including the Creek Show and the Austin Studio Tour (then known as East and West Austin Studio Tours). While there is no official partnership this year, the ADW organizers have considered possible timing conflicts with the Austin Studio Tour in the planning.
“We hope November can be that bigger festival of design and creativity in Austin,” says Barnes.
Collaboration is the lifeblood of Design Week. ADW’s volunteer PR director, Canan Kaba, owes important facets of her business to her connection through the initiative. Kaba and her husband, who own a local tile store called Clay Imports, started talking to another couple at Design Week after a panel discussion in the event’s opening year. The other couple included another tiler, who had just spoken on the panel discussion, and his wife, a textile designer. After becoming friends, the two couples entered into a business partnership.
“[The textile designer] is now designing complete lines of our collection and introducing further design core items into our company, ”says Kaba. “We have a very lively friendship and partnership.”
This is not an uncommon story for Design Week, which is hosting its fifth design-a-thon, solving real Austin problems with hypothetical design solutions created by teams over the course of the week. Some participants join as a group, others come together for the first time for the competition and especially for the connections. Each team is assigned a mentor and researched to create the perfect pitch that could earn them $ 250 in credit for the general assembly and attending the next South By Southwest festival.
Last year’s Design-a-thon winner, Team Riverbats, is returning this year to host their own event, Popcorn Pitches: Persuasion Through Cinematic Storytelling. This year’s call-to-action will be revealed at the pitching and team building event before Design Week begins in full. Even if the participants do not have time to take part in the design-a-thon, a career fair at the end of the week offers hirers an encounter with designers who are open to work or simply help to make contacts.
Co-creation shows up in several event titles and will certainly repeat itself in countless live conversations. It is enough both externally and internally: getting to know the needs of the uninhabited population of Austin with the aim of creating an interim solution (Co-creating a Storage Space and Employment Opportunities for People Experiencing Homelessness, November 8th) or how to get one encounters creative blockades and questioning self-doubts (Co-Creating With The Youniverse, November 10th).
An event on Tuesday November 9th will teach ancient folk weaving techniques to update the future with the work of our ancestors (The American Coverlet: Bringing a 300-year-old Folk Weaving Tradition Back to the Future). This is one of the few classes that resort to the future as a paradoxical view. Another course on Friday November 12th examines personal memory and how good ideas last even as industries change (Everything I know about brand identity I learned in the 1980s).
Other subtopics, as Barnes calls them, create threads between seemingly remote events. A blog post on the ADW website includes four tracks to simplify the audience experience: Architecture, Fashion, Workplace Discussions, and Creative Process. Finding somewhere to have remote study spaces (and free ones at that) provides a great pathway for remote participants to an experience where this is perfectly normal.
“The best design comes from people who you may not even identify as designers and who you may not necessarily know,” says Barnes. “I think that at design events we can often hear about these big names and look up to famous designers. Some of the most amazing designs and creativity I’ve ever seen come from people who aren’t always in the spotlight, and that’s what I love about Austin Design Week. “
The full schedule for Austin Design Week can be found at austindesignweek.org. Each entry specifies an intended audience so that participants can gauge the difficulty before committing. Events are popping up in Austin, but the ADW Hub makes a great base for those looking to play their schedules by ear.
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https://austin.culturemap.com/news/home-design/11-05-21-austin-design-week-free-annual-event-series/
