Vienna Design Week: Passionswege

As any football fan or star-crossed lover knows only too well: passion means suffering.

In Christian theology “The Passion” is specifically the suffering of Jesus in the moments leading up to and including his crucifixion.

Passionswege – can therefore be seen as equivalent to the 14 stations of the cross.

The Passionswege at Vienna Design Week has only very little with the morbid brutality of Jesus’ walk to Calvary and has much more related to the modern definition of passion; affection, excitement, enthusiasm, obsession and esprit.

On the Vienna Design Week Passionswege established Viennese design businesses and producers are teamed up with young designers to work on a joint project. Deliberately intended as being experimental, the Passionswege projects should help the business to remain contemporary by encouraging new ways of thinking and working, without abandoning their roots and tradition.

For the Design Week visitors the Passionswege not only presents the chance to see works created without the normal commercial restraints, but also the excuse to visit parts of Vienna that they otherwise wouldn’t.

And indeed to visit some business that wouldn’t normally let them in. You should have seen the looks of panic at P? when we opened the door…..

The Passionswege at the 2010 Vienna Design Week officially has 8 stations – our route has only seven.

P5 sadly succumbing to the outrageous demands of an overly self-important ORF film crew which meant that properly viewing the items or actually talking to the designers was rendered impossible.

Which is a shame, but hey we all have our cross to bear.

And P5 got their 34 seconds on ORF 2. So that was well worth the half an hour of filming…

The remaining seven Passionswege stations will be portrayed here over the coming days.