Design highlights

Our manager of UNESCO City of Design, Anna Day, looks back at the brilliant design year of 2017 and some of the highlights in Dundee

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or the whole UNESCO Dundee team, 2017 was a fantastic year – we met and exchanged ideas with our fellow Cities of Design, we expanded the team with a new staff member from Slovakia, and we worked with partners across the city. Here are a few of my highlights as we look back on a busy year.

DUNDEE DESIGN FESTIVAL

This was a brilliant highlight of the year for the whole UNESCO team. Five days of discussion and production, looking at the future of the workplace and how design makes a difference.

We returned to West Ward Works and ran five days of festival fun, under the theme of Factory Floor. The theme nodded to the rich heritage of Dundee’s industrial past and the shift towards making and creating in small, specialist ways. The building came alive once more with machines, people, discussion and debate.

The centrepiece of the festival was the Factory Floor exhibition, which showcased new objects and ideas emerging from studios and workshops around the globe. Featuring designers from Detroit, Stockholm and Berlin, alongside Scottish designers, you could see some great examples of contemporary design embracing experimental processes, and innovative materials matched with post-industrial production.

For the full five days of the event, Print Festival Scotland, a collaboration between the DCA and Dundee University took over an entire gallery space to produce an enormous installation of sculpture and print. The room, Print City, filled an entire cavernous space, where the public could take part in the construction or watch artists at work.

There was also a dedicated workshop space co-produced with Creative Dundee, to encourage people to come and spend a whole day at the festival – either to take up some tools and start making things, or perhaps setting up their laptops and working out of the space on their own projects.

DESIGN SERVICE ACADEMY

The new Service Design Academy at Dundee and Angus College was launched in November, the UK’S first comprehensive, accredited training provider for service design, delivered online by a world-class team.

Service design has the power to transform public services and communities, to enable companies to deliver new levels of value to their customers, and innovators to unlock the potential of new technologies that create value for society.

It is vital to our economy and to our public services in meeting the challenges and opportunities facing us.

The new academy looks set to shine another bright light on our city, an innovation of which we can all be proud.

STREET ART IN PUEBLA

A project in our fellow Design city, Puebla, was also a real highlight of the year for us.

In Puebla, and indeed across Mexico, drivers have a habit of ignoring some basic rules of the road, including respecting pedestrian crossings.

To try and counteract this issue, crossings throughout the city have been painted with bright colours or graphics. Dundee was asked to submit a design and we asked Louise Kirby to translate her Dundee Cake illustration into a pattern suitable for a zebra crossing – it looks fantastic and I love the idea that there’s a little bit of Dundee design in the heart of Mexico!

NEW CITIES

In November we were joined by new cities in our network – the whole Creative City team became even bigger, reaching 180 cities across the world in seven different designations from food to film, via music and media arts.

We welcomed mammoth cities including Brasilia (Brazil), Cape Town (South Africa) and Dubai (United Arab Emirates).

Smaller cities joined us too, including Kolding (Denmark) and Kortrijk (Belgium) – we’re already looking at exciting projects that could strengthen our ties together, allow us to learn from these new cities and meet and exchange ideas across the globe.

These are just a few of the best bits of design from 2017 – and there’s so much more to look forward to in 2018!

● Next week we’ll have a rundown of what Team UNESCO are looking forward to in the next 12 months.