ALL THE WORLD'S A FAIR
The number of design festivals in cities across the globe grows larger every day. But are design fairs really effective in drumming up business, boosting education, and promoting awareness of tomorrow's design capitals?
REQUIRED: one capacious tote-bag for brochures—bonus points if it rolls, levitates or otherwise spares your back. Two pairs of shoes, comfortable by day, shamelessly frivolous by night. Annotated conference schedule: no detours!! Your favorite colored pens for note-taking – better yet, just charge your cellphone cam. Protein-heavy snacks, scads of patience, business cards, and a stopwatch.
Check, check, Roger. You’re now equipped to tour the world’s growing cadre of design fairs.
Design fairs promise big, to participants and visitors alike: creative rejuvenation, intelligent debate, matchmaking for employees and partners, convenience for big buyers, a boost to design education, even fun for tourists. It’s inarguable design fairs represent a new wave in how designers promote themselves locally and internationally. In the past three years, Europe has gone from the twin-hegemony of London’s 100% Design and Milan’s Saloni Internazionale del Mobile, both furniture fairs, to a calendar thick with new, more inclusive design events, many in the EU’s emerging member-states. As sponsors, governments, universities and designers pour funds into these events, it’s worth asking: do they really work? What are they even aiming for?
THE ROLLING WHEEL OF COMMERCE
Even well past tea-time, London Design Festival director Ben Evans easily cranks up the juice. “In 2003 when we started, there weren’t more than three or four comparable events around the world. Since then, we’ve seen at least 15 or 20 new events internationally,” says Evans. “I’d say we’ll have 50 design fairs within the next 10-20 years. It’s a bit like how every city has its own film festival; now they need a design festival, too.”
The London Design Festival holds the crown as one of Europe’s, if not the world’s, largest design fairs. At 300,000 visitors from 32 countries and 208 projects exhibited in 2006, a three- and four-fold-plus increase over 2003, the Festival’s size alone draws participants seeking a concentrated look every September at the world’s best. Evans list three advantages the festival offers: communication muscle, intensified networking, and developing new audiences, both upmarket and down.
“London had all these great events happening, but they existed in little silos,” Evans explains. “Creating this platform made everyone’s voices louder.” The festival devotes the lion’s share of its £420,000 (US$825,000) budget to publicity. (Federal and city government pay half; the other half comes from sponsorships, booth and ticket revenue.) Publicity is also its chief measurable ROI: last year’s 400+ media clips represent £2.5 million (US$4.91 million) in U.K. press value alone.
Networking-wise, no doubt distributors find it convenient to do their buying at a few large fairs. But interconnections don’t run exclusively between distributor and producer. “We see consortiums coming together—government agencies, trade fairs, designers—that simply didn’t exist before,” Evans remarks.
Evans’ bell is clearly rung most by new audiences, the festival’s third advantage. He’s seeking to convert not just IKEA-graduates but also the high-end market. “The top end of design is now attracting art prices,” Evans continues. He sees design as the approachable alternative to contemporary art for ordinary Brits, too: “We’ve all got a sofa. It may be lumpy and feel like crap, but you can aspire to something better.”
As the design world’s commercial clearinghouse, London tracks surprisingly few hard ROI metrics. Evans cites participants’ reluctance to share sales figures, but it’s equally likely everyone rolls forward on faith. Like his sponsors and cohorts, Evans subscribes to economist Richard Florida’s popular “creative class” theory: cities which attract creative workers will benefit economically from the entrepreneurial wave that follows them. Critics contend that Florida confuses correlation with causation. Repeat participation, Evans counters, proves designers think the fair works.
Metrics or no, the London event provides some clear commercial benefits: a coordinated, screened opportunity to transact business efficiently, hire and partner with others, and lure consumers, on a scale that guarantees press coverage. In other words, being the 800-lb. gorilla counts for a lot.
TALK WILL BIND US TOGETHER
It’s not all about the Benjamins. Idea-exchange and education also drive design fairs and provide Dutch Design Week’s core catalyst: “Our aim is to bring designers together to talk about their work,” says John Lippinkhof, general manager of Design Platform Eindhoven, organizers of Dutch Design Week every October. “It’s not a commercial event. We ask designers to think about the design process…[and] the public gets invited into the kitchen.”
This self-organized event grew from a designers-only klatch ten years ago, to a week-long public event in 2003, to 50,000 mostly Dutch participants in 2006, split equally between designers, the public, and industry groups like manufacturers and distributors. Sixty percent of the event’s €1 million (US$1.3 million) comes from the Dutch government, the city of Eindhoven and the EU, and 40% from sponsors.
It’s tough to quantify dialogue’s value, but the chance to gather consumer feedback must be useful. “People are curious: what’s the input of the designer?” Lippinkhof remarks. “Design is a process [that’s] unknown to the general public, also to most of the industry.” Dutch Living Rooms revealed process directly by inviting designers to move their offices to the fairgrounds and work in a fishbowl. In the ongoing collaborative GreyTones project, graphic design firm Volle-Kracht worked onsite with spatial designers to create “The Human Freakshow”, a witty blending of photography, graphic arts, and special effects. “We’re the only event working on content,” adds Lippinkhof. “Others will discover quite soon it’s an attractive niche.”
He’s dead-on there. Budapest’s three-year-old design fair in September invites participants to hop an old Ikarus-model bus to visit nine themed design-studio tours, from jewelry to textiles to furniture. Another tramcar roves the city, hosting an impromptu exhibit on a particular design theme. Eva Medgyes, curator of Budapest’s Design Week (www.design7.hu), believes firmly the free-of-charge Design Tours provide the crucial link between the public, designers, and the city itself. “The idea is to show people where designers ‘hide’,” says Medgyes, noting that many bus-riders “return…as customers and commission-givers.” About 1500 of the event’s 36,500 visitors last year took the tours, accompanied by multilingual guides.
Tamás Futó seconds this wholeheartedly. As chairman of the Assocation of Hungarian Graphic Design Studios (MGSE), he exhibits winners of the annual Golden Thumbtack Prize at the Budapest Design Week. (Each year, the MGSE culls the best in Hungarian graphic design, awarding an old-fashioned golden thumbtack, which passes trophy-like from winner to winner.) “This exhibition of ‘everyday art’ is interesting for everybody,” Futó avers, citing as proof the 10,000 visitors last year to his mini-event.
PLEASE DO FEED THE TOURISTS
Budapest’s approach suggests a more buried economic driver behind the design-week explosion: cultural tourism. As design grows increasingly synonymous with creativity and affluence, tourism departments have taken note. Although Medgyes receives only logistical support from Budapest’s tourism board – her 16 million HUF (US$82,000) budget comes from the Hungarian Patent Office, the Hungarian Design Council and media sponsors—she plans to hitch her event to tourism trends bringing Budapest back into vogue. “Design spots and events are…a new target for incentive tourism all over the world,” Medgyes continues. Whether design events drove Prague’s or Berlin’s tourism or simply stamped their arrival to Western European standards is up for grabs.
Mining your location not only connects designers with tourist-customers but potentially enriches the event’s thematic relevance. Istanbul Design Week takes its cues from its magnificent location: the Old Galata Bridge spanning the Golden Horn’s waters. Hard between Sultanamet and the Blue Mosques in the old city and the Galata Tower and its beautifully crammed environs in the new, the place is steeped in centuries of craft, yet porous and open to both Europe and Asia.
Arhan Kayar, co-founder of Istanbul’s two-year-old event every June, clearly warms to the location as a creative wellspring: “What attracts me is…discussing ideas about the future on such a century-old bridge. It excites me that this has become a city project, embraced by all public segments.” Kayar’s studio Dream Design Factory (dDf) uses the locale as a springboard for the event identity as well: the event website lets users navigate a photo of the bridge’s underbelly, where each steel girder brings users to a new aspect of the fair. The fair logo – black-and-white lettering, with hot pink accents – not only works well as a stamp across promotional materials, it also contrasts brilliantly with the aquamarine waters of the Golden Horn itself.
The fair’s events are suffused with place, too: fashion shows housed in seaweed-strewn ferry terminals, water-themed industrial design exhibits, even a floating pavilion for workshops. Graphic designer Ay?e Çelim is generally skeptical of design fairs’ effectiveness for graphic designers, but praised Istanbul’s event as a great venue for peddling her T-shirts: “I was very happy with the attention,” Çelim says. “We had a live interview with CNN the very first day of the fair. Like the fair itself, Çelim’s exhibit centered around street art from various world capitals, along with T-shirts for font-fans of Helvetica, New York, and Garamond.
“If [you] think of this event as not ‘just another design event’ but a ‘city event’ [and] build a good and proper relationship with the city, that’s success,” Kayar avers. At the outer limits of Europe, Istanbul is banking on its centrality and uniquely open atmosphere to become a design-port as much as any other kind.
REDESIGNING THE RUBBLE
But what if your city is struggling and damaged, like Belgrade? The Belgrade Design Week springs from, and capitalizes on, location in a wholly different way. “This region is still a little exotic; people are curious—especially designers,” says program director Maja Vidakovic. Entering its second year in May, the inaugural event testifies to the power of audacity and scrappiness. After dictator Milosevic fell from power in 2000, Vidakovic and partners Nina Babic and Jovan Jelovac returned to their native Belgrade to find a city with, as Vidakovic puts it, “zero infrastructure.” Working still with former colleagues from New York, London, and Germany, the trio realized few younger Serbian designers enjoyed their advantages. By starting (and self-funding) a design fair, these designers hope to catalyze manufacturers, expose young designers to design greats, push design as an economic driver to policy wonks, develop consumers, elevate designers’ incomes, and establish Serbia as a regional design hub. It’s exhilarating to think design could be capable of forwarding such an agenda.
Last year’s event starred Karim Rashid (whom Vidakovic knows personally), Peter Saville, Gaetano Pesce, Ross Lovegrove, Luigi Colani and fellow Serb Konstantin Grcic. “It’s a funny thing about Serbian media,” laughs Vidakovic. “You can yell about some Serbian designer for a hundred years—and nothing. Tell them about a foreign guy who’s really famous, though, they give you all the coverage.” That coverage proved eye-opening for local government, manufacturers, and consumers—and yielded badly needed international contacts for local designers.
While Vidakovic won’t share budgetary figures, the results are promising: 12,000 attendees, solid press coverage, sufficient curiosity to power another megawatt speakers’ list —plus nibbles from local manufacturers and government. Vidakovic tells an apocryphal tale of a young designer who’d scored a spot at Milan’s satellite fair—only to be roundly rejected by local manufacturers to produce his prototype. “After Design Week, [manufacturers and printers] started thinking differently, that design was…something to help their businesses,” Vidakovic notes. “Before there was no sense that hiring someone creative should have value.” The Ghost Project exhibit makes this deficiency plain: a rolling slideshow of promising, but unrealized, projects by Serbian designers.
Illuminating a forgotten corner of the world offers the most moving raison d’être for hosting a fair. “We’ve lived in isolation for so many years,” Vidakovic continues. “Young people who are now 20, 22, the best years when you put on a backpack and travel—they’ve never left the country. It’s probably hard to understand from New York, where everything’s happening in front of you, [but] every single professional they can see in the flesh, talk to, get contact information from, start internships—it’s heartbreaking. It’s a matter of life or death for these kids.” Adds partner Nina Babic: “You have to be aware of this country’s disastrous background to understand the significance of this project and why we have such crazy commitment to it….People are re-learning that life isn’t only about surviving great drama, wars, political persecutions…but about the small stuff, that it’s okay to be happy. That’s a great motivator for me.”
—Jude Stewart for PRINT, May / June 2007
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