As The Smiths so succinctly put it, “Stop us, oh,oh,oh, stop us. Stop us if you think that you’ve heard this one before”
But once again October is out there, lurking, tacitly, like some not especially friendly sounding nuclear submarine.
And once more we find ourselves questioning not only the nature of our existence and the sociological sense of product design, but also why the European design weeks can’t sit down together and plan their year better?
Vienna Design Week. Always a mix of furniture and fascinating locations. Here Helmut Palla "You take a seat. I take a picture" in the Atelierhaus from 2010
As is traditional our October begins in the last September weekend with Vienna Design Week. Offering as ever a fascinating programme this year we are particularly looking forward to chatting to the designers from guest country Spain about the effects of the austerity measures on their work, meeting up with Van Bo Le-Mentzel to discuss his Hartz IV Furniture collection and in a similar vein seeing what this years “Social Design” contributors have come up with. Woe betide anyone who has developed an urban garden-in-a-box scheme……
The major disappointment this year is that following Vienna we will not moving on to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week.
We didn’t chicken out in face of the workload…. We’ll not really.
We just spent a solid week staring at our calendar and slowly accepting that if we wanted to do Dutch Design Week, Interieur Kortrijk, Orgatec and Designers Open. That we’d have to do Eindhoven and Kortrijk in three days.
Then travel straight to Cologne. And then straight on to Leipzig for Designers Open.
And so because Orgatec is a bi-annual must we found ourselves forced to make compromises elsewhere.
Which means sadly missing both Dutch Design Week and Interieur Kortrijk.
At the risk of repeating ourselves, it would be great if the international design festival community could get together and arrange a more user friendly calendar.
Orgatec 2010 meant Comunal Cells and Alcove Work by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra. And 2012?
For Orgatec 2012 we have some very special features lined up and will also bring you the best of the new developments in the world of office furniture before heading back over to Leipzig for Designers Open. And of course Grassimesse, which promises to be a little more engaging than it has been of late. In particular the results of the project “Ü 60 Design for Tomorrow” exploring “pensioner friendly design” looks like being a genuinely interesting presentation.
The seemingly never ending chase through the cold depths of international design is then intensified by the opening of the Vitra Design Museum‘s new exhibition “Pop Art Design”, the unveiling of Verner Panton‘s canteen design for “Der Spiegel” at its new home in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and the Award Ceremony for the Designpreis der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2012. Plus a few other events whose existence we are currently denying, but whose presence we can feel in the silent darkness that surrounds us.
And so we are resigned, once more, to a sleepless October until we can find the safe harbour of November.
But if all else fails ….. “Oh, so we drank one. It became four. And when we fell on the floor ……We drank more. Stop us, oh,oh,oh, stop us. Stop us if you think that you’ve heard this one before”