Things: objects of desire, status determinants, unnoticeable helpers, and sometimes persecutors. The way they are made, sold and used shapes our daily lives and our needs.
Modernity floods us with promises of instant gratification and immediate happiness. Designers become the rulers of human desires – they decide about our lives 24/7. They affect what we buy, what we wear, where we live, how we travel, and even what we eat.
Responding to real people’s needs and helping in everyday activities should be the main goal of design. The most important challenge that we can put before designers is to create items that make our lives better.
In a world where the most basic living needs have already been met, we can see more clearly that designers first shape objects and then objects shape us – change our habits, affect our health and well-being, and the way they are made and in which we use them affects our surroundings, the natural environment and whole communities.
In today’s complicated and ambiguous world, the awareness of the role that objects play in our lives is an element of everyday savoir-vivre, but also, more and more clearly, a survival guide.
This year’s edition of the festival will be a time to slow down, breathe and think about what really gives us the feeling of happiness, peace, luxury or security. Designers, architects, artists, creators – can they and their creations design a good life for us? And what does it, also in relation to objects, mean?
During the 13th, lucky edition of Łódź Design Festival, we will look together for the #GOOD LIFE recipe.
Awareness of the gigantic impact that design has on the natural environment and social relations makes us look for solutions that provide us with abundance and convenience, and at the same time save us from the ecological downfall. There are many proposals, both those that look forward to the future and those seeking answers in tradition and nature. Return to crafts and creating items to minimize waste; selecting new, greener materials and returning to the old, wrongly abandoned. Paying attention to the value of beautiful, functional and durable objects, created with passion, in harmony with nature and cultural traditions. Or maybe the way is to design things, places of our life and work in a way that lets us change our habits and customs?
These are some of the topics that we will face in the search for a good life during the Łódź Design Festival from 17th to 26th May 2019.
“The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.”
Victor Papanek
Łódź Design Festival is the oldest design festival in Poland, organized since 2007, devoted to industrial design, graphic design, architecture, craft, creation of services and interaction. The festival aspires to be the most opinion-forming event on design in Central and Eastern Europe. Each year, the festival presents the most important trends and directions in global design. It also awards the best designs and implementations of Polish and foreign designers in the make me! contest. and the must have! plebiscite. ŁDF is a platform for meetings between creators, producers and distributors, it enables and encourages participation in projects aimed at business development of the Polish design industry.
Łódź Design Festival is brought to you by Ceramika Paradyż – the Patron of the Festival, Łódź Event Center and the City of Łódź.