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 two successful festivals in 2007 and 2008, also this October an exquisite and colourful programme of events will be awaiting the visitors. Design has been and is 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.

A Platform for Design

In cooperation with many partners – from Vienna museums to production and retail companies to designers from all over the world – the whole of Vienna becomes a platform and showplace of design. VIENNA DESIGN WEEK doesn't have the character of a trade fair but instead offers a variety of venues and approaches specific to Vienna. The festival sets out to be "international but localised", with an abiding interest to cooperate with the flourishing design scenes of Central and Eastern Europe, and certainly beyond. Bringing to Vienna an important international design show every October is another example of the long-due international exchange VIENNA DESIGN WEEK is stimulating.

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 lie at the centre of design practice and consequently are important points of reference within VIENNA DESIGN WEEK.

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 and network, 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 energetically goes into the third 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.

Above: Edition of vases by Marco Dessi for Augarten Porzellan, VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2008
Credit: www.katharinagossow.com