CREATING THE FUTURE
BANGKOK DESIGN WEEK KICKS OFF WITH EVENTS ACROSS THE CITY
From tomorrow until Feb 4, Bangkok will turn into a design-lover’s haven as Bangkok Design Week will finally open its many doors to the public. Organised by the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) — the same team that successfully gave us Chiang Mai Design Week — this will be Bangkok’s first ever such event.
Under the theme “The New-ist Vibes”, Bangkok Design Week not only hopes to promote local creative businesses, but to show off the potential of the city in terms of design and creativity as well. To do this, they are working with over 500 organisations, local and international designers and entrepreneurs, spreading the event across five main areas of Bangkok: Charoen Krung, Klong San, Sam Yan, Rama 1 and Sukhumvit.
Dividing the festival into three main topics — City & Living, Well-being & Gastronomy and Creative Businesses, deputy managing director of the TCDC Kittiratana Pitipanich hopes the festival will link people and businesses directly with one another in order to create new opportunities and find solutions for better living.
“This is the heart of a creative economy,” he said. “If creatives don’t meet, new things won’t happen. Design Week is like an accelerator to this. Within the chaos and disorganisation of Bangkok, new creative solutions can come up from these groups of people, and they’re able to build new businesses and opportunities within the country.”
Some projects include making certain roads more walkable by building an aesthetically pleasing shading system, or creating more green space by building a park on a floating vessel.
“We built this in order to ask questions like, ‘Why don’t we have green space? Are there other solutions that can be created in this congested city?’,” said TCDC’s Creative Space Development director Pichit Virakabutra.
“It’s a controversial piece. There are people saying it’s a stupid idea. Others say it creates a statement. It’s debatable and it creates conversation. TCDC tries to redefine the word ‘design’ from just the aesthetics of ‘it’s made of plastic’ to look at how we can solve problems in a holistic approach.”
It’s going to be a huge event, and with nine days of over 230 showcases, exhibitions, symposiums and talks, Life has picked out some key highlights in each area for those short on time.