What to anticipate on the Dundee Design Pageant

All set to showcase the transformative energy of design throughout a number of disciplines, the annual Dundee Design Pageant (DDF), held in Scotland, will convey collectively a various vary of designers, artists, and business leaders. However what units it other than comparable design occasions throughout the globe is the truth that it’s aiming to be the world’s most sustainable design pageant. How so?

DDF’s Inventive Director, Stacey Hunter, says she developed an industrial supplies palette fairly early for the pageant. “That permits me to do issues like construct a lot of plinths and conventional tabletop fashion shows utilizing supplies like bricks, base blocks, terracotta insulation bricks and different sheet supplies. Should you prepare them in the suitable manner, they usually’re large enough, don’t need to be glued or joined in a everlasting manner. Because of this after the pageant, these supplies stay undamaged and may be then used and reused time and again,” she says of the pageant’s fifth version that has over 180 collaborating designers.

Excerpts from an interview:

What was the thought behind this 12 months’s theme, multiplicity?

It was necessary to me that we confirmed the breadth and the depth of design, from the handcrafted like, glass, ceramics and jewelry, all over to graphic design, structure, city design, and likewise to show the best way that design intersects with different artwork varieties and applied sciences. So this concept of ‘multiplicity’ permits us to be beneficiant with our programme, and embrace a number of the finest designers, all underneath one roof.

The collaborating designers come from assorted fields. Was this a acutely aware resolution?

Our invited individuals are utilizing contemporary pondering, new methods and thrilling methods of doing issues. They provide a really distinctive aesthetic, and that enables guests to the pageant to see how various Scottish design and the Scottish design scene is.

Artist Jennifer Grey’s ‘World at her fingertips’
| Picture Credit score:
Reuben Paris

Because the pageant is a mixture of exhibitions, workshops, talks and occasions there’s been a variety of various programmed actions. For Hyper-Native, we’ve collected a various number of design objects sourced from throughout the worldwide artistic cities community that every converse to their native land. Framework is a snapshot of Scottish design chosen from an open name. Materialise is a sequence of set up commissions and associated workshops from 4 main design studios invited to take part and Bookends is a brand new sequence of works commissioned from 20 thrilling Scotland-based designers. 

The pageant is claimed to be the world’s most sustainable design pageant. How so?

As a crew, we have now taken a cross sectional strategy to eager about all totally different points of how we produce a design pageant and the way guests work together with us. In order that implies that we take into consideration not simply the pageant displays and the way we produce the presentation of the pageant, however we additionally take into consideration how audiences are going to move themselves to us, how we offer meals and drinks, and the way we supply providers and supplies.

DDF is predicated on the Michelin Scotland Innovation Park, a former tyre manufacturing unit
| Picture Credit score:
Grant Anderson

One of many main components that makes Dundee Design pageant so sustainable is our web site. We’re based mostly on the Michelin Scotland Innovation Park, a former tyre manufacturing unit that’s now powered by windmills, which give clear power. We now have dedicated to make use of lower than 30% virgin supplies for the construct and supply of the pageant.

You have got been vocal concerning the wasteful nature of most design gala’s and festivals. How have you ever modified that with the Dundee Fest?

In 2024, with all the pieces that we now learn about local weather change and the local weather emergency, we are able to now not justify a state of affairs the place any kind of pageant is constructed on a big scale with very bespoke displays that use supplies that aren’t simple to be reused or recycled. An extended lead in time with our companions at Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc. has enabled us to liaise over an extended interval domestically and talk with different cultural companions throughout the nation. We’ve been capable of settle for donations of top of the range infrastructure within the type of former exhibition infrastructure and cabinetry. 

The crew has dedicated to make use of lower than 30% virgin supplies for the construct and supply of the pageant
| Picture Credit score:
Grant Anderson

We’re working actually arduous to make it possible for there isn’t any meals waste. So we’re calculating what number of guests we anticipate to have every day very rigorously. Any residual supplies are taken to the recycling centre subsequent door to be recycled and changed into power. We’re additionally working with sustainable transport supplier Ember to convey audiences from cities throughout Scotland by electrical automobiles. And these automobiles are charged right here utilizing the wind-powered electrical energy generated on web site.

Alicia Storie’s Tiny Home
| Picture Credit score:
Megan Redden Pictures

4 of Scotland’s most progressive design studios will create large-scale installations. Please elaborate 

Every design studio or particular person designer is taking a totally totally different strategy to design. Donna Wilson, a textile designer and knitwear designer (who runs Knit Store) is making a magical, enchanted forest filled with knitted bushes with a particular new character that she has created only for Dundee Design Pageant. He’s going to be nestling throughout the forest, and his hair (which may’t cease rising) is created from yarn which shall be fed into a conventional knitting machine so pageant guests can use it to make one lengthy unending scarf.  

Donna Wilson’s paintings
| Picture Credit score:
Jonty Wilson courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Timorous Beasties is made up of Paul Simmons and Alistair McAuley, who graduated from Glasgow Faculty of Artwork and are identified internationally for fantastically high-impact maximalist designs for wall coverings and textiles. For our design pageant, they’re creating an infinite set up that’s formulated in such a manner that audiences will truly have the ability to stroll in amongst the hanging material within the type of a sort of maze.

Alicia Storie is constructing with our crew, the define, or, shall we embrace, the skeleton of a Tiny Home. The Tiny Home shall be established in two elements, one half will provide a workshop house for guests, and the opposite aspect of the Tiny Home shall be a supplies library, you’ll have the ability to stroll round and discover out about thrilling new and progressive supplies that are rooted in sustainability. 

Artwork by Timorous Beasties
| Picture Credit score:
ADRIAN BARRY

And eventually, Gabriella Marcella is the design lead of certainly one of Scotland’s most enjoyable design companies, Risotto Studio, who will discover motion and costume design inside her apply as a designer. 

Guests on the DDF
| Picture Credit score:
Grant Anderson

Dundee Design Pageant shall be held from September 23 to 29, 2024 at Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc, Dundee, Scotland.