Here’s what to expect at Dundee Design Festival 2024 - an event with an impressive reusable exhibition design palette.

Dundee Design Festival celebrates 10 years as a UNESCO City of Design, hosting a full programme of creative events across the city next week.

Offering immersive wallpapered worlds, masterclasses in sustainable interior design, and a roster of over 180 craft and design professionals, this inspirational event is set to run from 23-29 September at former factory site, Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc.

Dundee is the first and only UNESCO Creative City in the UK, globally recognised for its rich design heritage and thriving creative communities. Activities across the week include making beasties with Donna Wilson, screen printing with Timorous Beasties, and getting to grips with sustainable interior design with AdesignStorie.

Committed to delivering one of the world’s most sustainable design festivals, Dundee Design Festival’s partnerships with V&A Dundee, MYB Textiles, Scott & Fyffe and Bard helped to repurpose exhibition materials, and Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc powers the festival site with clean energy. Additionally, Ember provides electric public transport.

All of these efforts contributed to using no more than 30% of new materials in the festival build, working with a reusable exhibition design palette, and following a sustainability decision making matrix to ensure circular was central to all plans.

If you're visiting the festival, here's a glimpse of what to expect...

FRAMEWORK

Over 70 designs have been selected for this exhibition from an open call, capturing a snapshot of Scottish contemporary design today. From Fair Isle to Dumfries to Galloway, this exhibition features exhibits as diverse as aircraft seating design to insect inspired jewellery. Ceramics, sculpture, glass, furniture, sustainable fashion, jewellery and graphic design all feature, giving visitors an opportunity to see how design interacts with other creative disciplines.

BOOKENDS

Festival creative director, Dr Stacey Hunter, invited 20 Scotland-based designers to respond to the collected writings of Bessie Maxwell and Marie Imandt, two of the first female correspondents to circumnavigate the globe in 1894 and report back to eager readers of The Courier and Weekly News. The selected designers took inspiration for their designs from the landscapes they encountered, the cultural differences the writers discovered, the impact of their writing and more.

The result is a unique exhibition of objects, holding as many stories as the books that could sit between them. Designers and studios featured are; Adam Johnston, Akiko Matsuda, Alistair Byars of GRAS, Aymeric Renoud, Camillo Atlas, Steven Blench of Chalk Plaster, Ciara Isabel Neufeldt, Granite + Smoke (Lindsey Hesketh + Claire Canning), James Rigler, Jennifer Gray, Juli Bolaños-Durman, Kate Trouw, Lauren Morsley, Louise Forbes Design, Marc Sweeney, MULGREW, Nicholas Denney Studio, Nick Ross, Wobbly Digital by Soorin Shin, and Stefanie Ying Lin Cheong.

MATERIALISE

In the exhibition, ‘MATERIALISE’, four of Scotland’s leading design studios were invited to embrace the space and ambition inherent in the festival site. The result is a series of large-scale installations, inviting festival visitors to see Scottish design up-close, get hands-on with materials, learn about new approaches to interior design, play with colour and fabric, and even enjoy design-inspired performance.

Glasgow-based design studio, Timorous Beasties will create an immersive maze-like space framed by its iconic wallpaper design, as well as hosting screen printing sessions so that drop-in visitors can make-over their own bags, fabrics or clothes. Alicia Storie of ADesignStorie will lead a programme of workshops on sustainable interior design from a climate conscious tiny house installation that encourages the exploration of healthy materials.

Visitors to ‘The House of Wellbeing’ installation will also have an opportunity to discover the latest sustainable materials available to designers and makers.

Donna Wilson will welcome explorers of all ages to discover the enchanted knitted forest which is home to a host of her beloved woolly creatures. Festival goers will also have the opportunity to make their own beasties with the guidance of Donna’s Dundee-based Knit Shop team as waste wool becomes transformed into creatures of wonder.

Finally, Gabriella Marcella’s installation, ‘Challenging Uniformity’ merges play and performance with her colourful exploration of uniform design. With input from festival visitors, Challenging Uniformity will demonstrate creative expression, improvisation, activism, and customisation.

HYPER-LOCAL

2024 marks the 10th anniversary of Dundee’s status as a UNESCO City of Design, recognising the region's diverse contributions to design in fields including comics, textiles, medical innovation and video games. One of a global network of 49 cities around the world, the HYPER-LOCAL exhibition celebrates those international connections with a display of over 50 design objects linked to their host cities.

The participating cities are; Bilbao (Spain), Dundee (Scotland), Detroit (USA), Graz (Austria), Kortrijk (Belgium), Nagoya (Japan), Queretaro (Mexico), and Wuhan (China). Designs on show include Japanese eyewear from Nagoya, Mexican craft from Queretaro, sustainably pressed vinyl records from Detroit, lighting from Bilbao, Kortrijk, and Graz, traditional masks from Wuhan, and patterned furniture, stone and knitwear from Dundee.

To find out more about Dundee Design Festival and to book your tickets, click here