This year’s eleventh edition of Łódź Design Festival entitled OD.NOWA (A.NEW) took place from 3 to 8 October. The event, advertised as the most important event in Central and Eastern Europe gathering designers of various nationalities, presented various faces of design. The viewers had an opportunity to see examples of industrial design, graphic design, fashion and architecture – in short, to get acquainted with the most recent trends and achievements in Polish and international design, in its broad sense. The festival was built around the notion of novelty which has become the symbol of our times. The organisers and designers posed a question of what future is to come and what can help us adjust to the future. The outcomes of these thoughts were presented in two most notable exhibitions within the event. An exhibition entitled New Old – designing for our future selves, concentrated on the issue of ageing society and an attempt to overcome obstacles which come with age, while on the other one entitled Urban Daydreaming the organisers presented scenarios of the development of cities, highlighting the substantial role of nature we need to introduce back into our lives. The Mystery Things Museum, a collection of mysteriously-looking objects the function of which could not be defined at first sight, turned out to be extremely surprising.
The international competition make me! addressed to young designers, is an integral part of the event. It is gaining in popularity each year, and the prize-winners often become extremely successful artists. In this year’s tenth edition, the prize-winners were Benno Brucksch for his Crayons out of Soil project (the main prize), Jan Libera for his bicycle trailer design, and Magdalena Kucharska for her Baltica ceramics design.
The Organisers of Łódź Design Festival 2017 managed to gather such a large number of interesting ideas that it is extremely difficult to describe them all in detail. For that reason, without further ado, I would like to invite you to see the exhibition gathering the presented objects.
