Vancouver. Edge city. A territory on the geographic and cultural periphery. A place where people come to escape the confines of convention and a place with a unique aptitude for free thinking, incubating and instigating. The results: creation of global phenomena – Occupy, Greenpeace, and Vancouverism; pioneering of West Coast Modernism; and home to a long list of world-class designers and innovators. And yet, “although some of the world’s greatest designers live/work in Vancouver they are (here at home) unknown, undervalued and disconnected from one another.” [Jane Cox, Cause+Affect] – limiting our potential for agency as both a culture and a city.
Vancouver Design Week is an opportunity to redress this.
Taking place from September 15-28, 2014, Vancouver Design Week is city-wide platform, invitation and call to action – to celebrate established and emergent design talent; to spotlight broad-spectrum design innovation; to cross-pollinate and empower designers and design thinkers across disciplines, and to leverage the potential of design for transformative agency and holistic capital in Vancouver and beyond.
For 14 days, Vancouver Design Week will turn the city into a petri-dish of design process, practice and perspectives; through a wide range of independent and collaborative programming. From talks to tours, exhibits to workshops, parties to pop-ups, design across disciplines will open its doors for conversations, installations and celebrations of all scales.
Part of Vancouver Design Week is Built [email protected]: Fashioning Performance | Fabric and Urban Form at the Museum of Vancouver, which features speakers Alexandra Plante – inventor, material engineer, and project design lead for Lululemon’s newly created Whitespace Innovation Workshop, and Christopher Sharples, AIA, a principal of SHoP Architects and SC | SHoP Construction in New York.
This inaugural Vancouver Design Week will establish not only an annual event in Metro Vancouver but the opportunity to initiate a broader Pacific North West dialogue – towards catalyzing an even more transformative Vancouver design culture.
For more information, please visit http://vancouverdesignwk.com