Dundee Design Festival 2021

How do you put on a design festival during a global pandemic? It's pretty tricky, especially When you can't put large amounts of people into the same space. So we created four Design Houses across Dundee and one digital design house to explore the theme of Everywhere Design.

Identity
Design

The brand identity for DDF21 was created to be fluid and shape shift with different versions constantly in use, this reflected the nature of the festival where visitor input created a constantly changing environment in each house.

Locations

Old red brick substation on the edge of Finlathen Park.

Graphic Toolkit

Posters

Space
Development

Finding and transforming spaces for the festival was one of the biggest challenges, we worked with a talented team to transform each one and reused stored elements from 2019 as well as recycling industry waste items to achieve this.

Two people are marking and painting the interior of the space the bold graphic shapes.

Man on a ladder carefully paints a shape.

Furniture made out of cradboard tubes is being constructed.

Painted furniture made from cardboard tubes sits in a painting area.

Six barrels in a 2x3 formation are joined to create a spinning barrel wall.

Many character pices lie on a cutting bed after the CNC machine has cut them.

The Festival

Two women stand behind a bench in a room filled with vibrant graphic shapes.

Two volunteers help visitors create their design to apply it to a sweatshirt.

3 volunteers wearing masks show of their self-designed sweatshirts with the words here to help.

Man stands infront of colourful barrel wall holding t-shirt he has just deisgned.

4 teenage girls stand infront of sign with the message Every Where Design

3 women create their design in vinyl ready to put onto sweatshirts.

At the entrance to the Hilltown Park person shows off tote bag.

Shopfront in the sunshine called the Stobswellbeing Store.

People browse a store filled with packages.

Close up of packaging showing character parts like the 'under flarm'

Close up of packaging showing character parts like the 'Mexican wavers'

Characters constructed from the different parts in the shop.

Woman holds up the character she has designed in front of barrel wall.

Basset Hound called Fred runs out of shop front to a queue of people.

Scaffold structure houses children and 2 adults with the title Game Designer.

Lots of people gather around a table constructing their games from lots of different pieces.

Shadows cast across the game designer structure and table with worksheets and game pieces.

Two boys play the mini golf course they have designed.

Woman with her head inside a giant tube listens to soundscapes from across the world.

Kiosk at the V&A Dundee to explain What is Design?

Many people enjoying the giant design process ball run at the waterfront in Dundee.

Sad 3 dimensional character face is spattered with rain.

Colouring
Book

We worked with German illustrator Dana Ulama and Dundee photographer Kathryn Rattray to document and turn less well celebrated landmarks into a colouring book that was available for free to visitors of the festival.