Round Up of DE07...

Design Event is the North East’s annual design festival

Design Event 07 drew on a diverse group of interesting and conscientious designers to answer it’s own brief of ‘How do we want to live?’: The call prompted a wide selection of the North East designers and international collectives to respond with some interesting interventions in the city of Newcastle as well as some great exhibitions in Sunderland and Northumberland as well as Newcastle. Utilising art centres, museums, ex factories and even a disused fire station Design Event 07 reached a wider audience than ever before. [re]design chose to level with Newcastle’s consumers on their own territory: the shopping precinct, their robust approach to targeting the public with large steel containers placed in the middle of Newcastle’s main shopping area, Monument, exposed a wide range of products to an audience that perhaps would not otherwise have gained from immediate interest in the rest of the Design Event programme.

The spirit of collaboration with the people of the North East was clearly visible. Design Event 07 succeeded in opening the doors to active participation with the people of the North East.

The 24 events on offer allowed for various tastes and levels of design understanding whilst keeping a clear and focused view on what a design expo should be.

If your taste in design revolved around large scale art objects, there was the National Glass Centre in Sunderland where Mathias Bengstsson’s sculptural furniture was on display. Bengstsson’s work was again featured in Sunderland, in a group exhibition called ‘Decompression Chamber’ with six other artists: Andrew Chadwick, Jonathan K Holden, Max Lamb, lee McCormack, Yuko Minamide and Hill Jephson Robb at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art.

If graphic design was more your (very well designed) bag, then there was ample opportunity to view some of the best in graphic work that the North East has given the world in the exhibition ‘Our Friends in the North’. Reading like a Who’s Who of contemporary graphic design, Mark Blamire, Peter Chadwick, Richard Fenwick, Alaric Hammond, Dave Malone, Paul McAnelly, Vaughan Oliver, Michael C. Place, Phil Sims and Richard Short (who curated the exhibition as  Lobster Foundation) showed that their roots may be in the North East but their work is well travelled and is internationally recognised.

Another venue displaying home grown talent was Launch, a furniture / interior design based show involving a mix of 17 artists and collectives. Curated by the Deadgood collective, Launch provided a platform for fresh product ideas and collaborations between designers. The audience was invited to participate in two of the exhibits: ‘If you could…’ by Alex Bec and Will Hudson asked the public ‘If you could do anything tomorrow what would it be?’ with some amusing results. Looking at all our futures, Cohda took recycling to the people with their own  processing factory that converted plastic bags and plastic waste into usable plastic furniture, much to the astonishment of local schoolchildren, proving that design in action is a great educational tool.

If the matters of the mind were on yours then there was plenty of education programmed during DE 07 to keep even the keenest student occupied. With the support of NESTA, a series of talks with a selection of local and national guest speakers discussed topics ranging from ‘ The Business of Design’ to ‘Creative Cities’, backed up with film screenings and an architectural tour of Newcastle under the direction of Northern Architecture.

The success of Design Event is in its ability to give life and energy to its satellite collaborators by bringing the North East’s arts venues, practitioners and audience together to celebrate design.

The North East is an exceptionally busy region for the arts all year round but for the 3 weeks, or so, of the year, there is a focus, a hub and a reason to celebrate the diverse talent, not only from the North East of England but from all over Northern Europe, that gravitates to the region.

Design Event 08 is set to build on the success of this year’s event…

Robert Urquhart

Designers are Wankers