From product and industrial design to graphic design, architecture, communications and interior design, all the disciplines will be present in the 200 activities in which 320 designers and professionals will take part
Exhibitions, workshops, master classes, professional meetings, conferences and installations in urban spaces will be the key features of the festival
Jaime Hayon, Erwan Bouroullec, Jasper Morrison, Rossana Orlandi, Daan Roosegaarde, Martí Guixé, Abbott Miller, Inma Bermúdez, Jeffrey Ludlow, Toni Segarra, Fernando Gutiérrez, Teresa Sapey, Juan Herreros, Oskar Zieta, Nacho Carbonell and Mischer Traxler are some of key attractions for this edition.
Madrid Design Festival will feature 48 exhibitions and urban installations, 28 museums and public and private institutions are participating as well as 25 brands with design in their DNA
Helsinki is the festival’s guest city and there will be a full programme of activities to show the best of Finnish design in Madrid
On 14th, 15th and 16th February MadridDesignPRO, at the Official College of Architects of Madrid (COAM), will offer more than 100 hours of professional activities with over 70 guests who are coming to Madrid with the common goal of Redesigning the World
The local design community will play an essential role in the planned events through Showrooms and the Festival OFF with 40 spaces featuring installations, specific decoration and proposals from designers based in Madrid
Festival press kit and images
From the 1st to 28th February Madrid will host the first edition of Madrid Design Festival. This event, which will take place throughout the city, will turn the capital of Spain into an international design showcase for a month every year.
Madrid Design Festival is a new project from La Fábrica created with the aim of helping to democratise design, to convey the importance of a discipline that transforms our daily lives and to put Madrid and Spain on the international design map.
Madrid Design Festival aims to place itself in the context of major international events and to launch a message to society that supports design by spotlighting innovative international initiatives and promoting the work of Spanish designers to the general public.
Madrid Design Festival will be a meeting point that will offer new perspectives to design lovers and it will encourage the public to get involved and to know this discipline, while at the same time offering professionals somewhere to meet. It will also highlight the value of the legacy of companies and institutions committed to supporting design.
The festival will set out an overall comprehensive view of design, ranging from product and industrial design to graphic, architecture, interior design, communications and interior design, hybridising them all into a contemporary and innovative format.
To this end, Madrid Design Festival offers a multidisciplinary programme to show proposals from leading designers while, at the same time, supporting young ones. With more than 320 professionals, 200 activities, 48 exhibitions and support from 28 museums and institutions and 25 brands with design in their DNA, the festival will feature exhibitions, workshops, master classes, installations in the urban space, music, a programme for professionals and proposals from the city’s business community.
Madrid Design Festival is directed by Álvaro Matias and has an advisory committee composed of Alberto Barreiro, Paloma Cañizares, Izaskun Chinchilla, Ana Domínguez Siemens, Juan Herreros, Jorge Penadés, Fernando Gutiérrez (creator of the festival’s graphic identity) and Toni Segarra who, along with SCPF, is responsible for the Redesigning the World communication campaign.
Exhibitions that will bring design closer to the general public
The Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa is the main exhibition venue with three offerings produced by the festival. Backstage, Jaime Hayon. De lo imaginario a lo real, a fantastic solo exhibition by Jaime Hayon that will allow visitors to look at the designer’s creative process through his most representative works. The household appliances of our life. A history of design. The Alfaro Hofmann Collection, will present the historical evolution of household appliances since the early 20th century, including refrigerators, cookers, mixers, kettles, toasters, stoves, washing machines, irons, vacuum cleaners, record players, radios, televisions and telephones. Meanwhile, Vinilygráfica. Masters of musical graphic design will pay tribute to the designers who have illustrated the record covers of legendary musicians and bands, with the iconic work of designers like Alex Steinweiss, Reid Miles, John Berg, Paula Scher, Peter Saville, Andy Warhol, Juan Gatti, Daniel Gil and José Bort, among others.
COAM, the Official College of Architects of Madrid, the official festival headquarters, will host the exhibition of the Rado Star Prize Spain 2018 award. This contest invites young designers to present projects with a vision of the future that explores the theme Design meets time, the relationship between design and time. This same venue will host a selection of Andreu World’s most iconic designs. The book Chairs, by the journalist and historian Anatxu Zabalbescoa, is being presented as part of this exhibition.
Fundación Telefónica will present Naturaleza digital, an exhibition by the artist Jennifer Steinkamp with five video installations that convert the exhibition space into a digital forest. In CentroCentro Viva la differencia, curated by Ana Dominguez, Siemens will take a look at contemporary designers’ efforts to address consumers’ desires to escape from an undifferentiated domestic landscape resulting from industrial production.
The Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas will bring together an exhibition of contemporary jewellery and metalwork with 80 original pieces by 18 designers. Meanwhile, the Museo ABC will offer a look at the origins of interior design in Spain with its collections and a selection of furniture in the exhibition entitled A ritmo de Jazz. Diseño art decó en la Colección ABC. In addition, the Thyssen Bornemisza and Sorolla museums join the festival with a simultaneous exhibition that proposes a dialogue between the work of Joaquín Sorolla and fashion.
DIMAD /Central de Diseño – one of Madrid’s design hotspots – will host Here and out with the results of the Workshop Flow conducted with students from the Eindhoven Design Academy and various design schools in Madrid.
The finalist projects for the New Designers Awards, invited by Neo2 magazine, will be assembled into an exhibition at the Centro Cultural Galileo, in order to recognise the talent of up-and-coming Spanish designers.
Design in every corner of the city
Madrid Design Festival will instil design in every corner of the city with installations in urban spaces. Moreover, some of the city’s main museums are joining the festival with proposals for tours especially created to enjoy the pieces in their collections which are closely related to design. The museums: Museo de Artes Decorativas, Museo Arqueológico, Museo Sorolla, Museo Lázaro Galdiano and Museo del Romanticismo are taking part in these tours.
The festival will feature several installations. Enorme Studio, in collaboration with MINI, will install a design workshop in Plaza Santa María Soledad Torres Acosta. Montaña en la luna will be a meeting point for design and the city; it is committed to using renewable energy and will provide USB charging points and reading points illuminated with solar energy. This portable design and architecture office will also offer workshops, lectures, meetings with designers and creation laboratories.
In collaboration with Cervezas Alhambras, the designer Nacho Carbonell will create an artistic installation designed to serve as a meeting point in the city at the Central de Diseño de Matadero Madrid. Part of the crear/sin/prisa (creat/without/hurry) project, the work is inspired by the Alhambra’s Patio of the Lions and was made with barley mash and 10,000 melted Alhambra beer bottles.
The Neomudéjar will host a large IKEA installation in which design lovers can take a look at some of the company’s upcoming collections and learn from Marcus Engman, its head of design, about the “democratic design” philosophy that has made the Swedish brand a global leader of design.
Helsinki, guest city at Madrid Design Festival
Helsinki, one of the top capitals in international design, is the festival’s guest city and it will offer several activities that bring the finest examples of Finnish design to Madrid. The terrace of the Only You Atocha Hotel– the official festival hotel – will offer the opportunity to try out an authentic Finnish sauna. This enclave will preserve the original spirit of a social meeting point with the added touch of being a sauna designed in collaboration with a Spanish architect. The Only You Hotel will also host an exhibition of Finnish fashion and a designer restaurant with dishes by chef Jyrki Tsutsunen. In addition, the Museo ABC will be the stage for several conferences focusing on Finnish design and architecture.
Meeting point for design professionals
Madrid Design Festival will bring together design professionals through an extraordinary programme that features conferences, master classes, workshops, business meetings and viewings, in which design professionals or those aspiring to become designers, can contact with top national and international professionals.
On the 14th, 15th and 16th February, COAM will host MadridDesignPRO, with over 100 hours of activities involving 70 professionals who will be reflecting on the common slogan of Redesigning the World. Erwan Bouroullec, Abbot Miller, Daan Roosegaarde, Martí Guixé, Massoud Hassani, Mischer Traxler and Jasper Morrison are some of the designers who will be visiting Madrid.
This professional programme is supported by Iberia, LG and Acción Cultural Española AC/E, an institution that has made it possible to count on the presence of professionals from prestigious institutions and museums linked to design at this encounter: Bárbara Coutinho (MUDE Museum Lisboa); Tulga Beyerle (Kunstgewer –bemuseumos); Ben Evans (London Design Festival); Kari Korkman (Semana del Diseño de Helsinki); and Marva Griffing (Salone del Mobile).
MadridDesignPRO is focused on setting out and solving today’s great challenges as seen from a design perspective. Its key structure is the concept of D+ (design plus) intended to illustrate the importance of linking the traditional categories of economy and society to design: D + N (Design + Business); D+ S (Design + Society); D + X (Design + Experience); D + C (Design + City); D + Technology (Design + Technology).
Together with the London College of Fashion, the festival’s guest college, COAM will also host the Aristocrazy Design Bootcamp: three jewellery workshop sessions conducted by the prestigious school in which young women designers previously selected in a competition will take part.
Fundación Telefónica will be the venue for the Superhumanity conference, an event taking place on 19th and 20th February that will bring together architects, designers, artists and philosophers with the goal of taking a detailed look at the radical redesign of human beings and their environment, caused by social media activities.
Conde Duque cultural centre will host the T–Day session. Organised by T Magazine, it will offer a philosophical reflection on the nature of design, review its history and even question its limits. In addition, the programme entitled Ladies, Wine & Design will focus on women in the world of design. Here, children will also be able to come into contact with design in two workshops where they will learn to build a robotic car and a light tracking device.
The Club Matador is the venue of Question marks, directed by Quico Vidal, promotor of Nadie. The Creative Think Tank, a meeting of professionals who will discuss the evolution of the brands in contemporary cultural conception, while the National Library will join the festival with the presentation of the book El espejo y el martillo, by Manuel Álvarez Junco.
Medialab Prado offers the session entitled Off Topic, organised by the Asociación para la Ingeniería y Diseño Industrial, where various professionals from the design industry analyse the influence on the kitchen world, from instruments to designer food and even 3D food printing.
Meanwhile, IED, the official school of the festival, will offer a comprehensive programme that includes tours of the studios, workshops and showrooms, conferences, and exhibitions. And, during February, MINI Hub will host a special programme on design with lectures and meetings with designers and the Diseñatón, in which several teams of designers will spend time working on a solution to an industrial design challenge.
The Círculo de Bellas Artes will bring the programme to an end with Día D: two meetings in which intellectuals, artists and researchers discuss the future in terms of design. Juan Navarro Baldewerg, Manuel Fontán del Junto, José Manuel Sánchez Ron and Enrique Alonso will participate.
In addition, with the help of Johnnie Walker, one of the festival’s main partners, Café Comercial will become the official afterwork spot for the Madrid Design Festival. A space where you can share experiences, with an agenda full of exclusive events featuring music, fun and design.
Showrooms and OFF Festival
One of Madrid Design Festival’s commitments is to the city’s design community, spotlighting spaces where design is part of the DNA. The festival has four showrooms where Roca Madrid Gallery Vitra, Cosentino, and Actiu offer proposals on design, from exhibitions to workshops and lectures by professionals, with participants including the architect Teresa Sapey, the chef Ángel León and the National Design Award winners Mario Ruiz (2016), Manuel Estrada (2017) and Nacho Lavernia (2012).
The OFF Festival has 40 spaces where activities, exhibitions and meetings about design during Madrid Design Festival will be organised. Participants: _2bspacetobe, Abanuc, Ábbatte, Alohe Óptica, Álvaro Catalán de Ocón, Balik Handmade, Batavia, B.D. Madrid, BO Concept, Bulthaup Claudio Coello, Caotics Unexpected Art Design, Chic & Soul, Estudio Chus Burés, Despacio Concept Store, DMAD, Estudio Báltico, Experimento, Gancedo, Gandía Blasco, id.real, Ignacio Valdés, Karen Hallam Jewellery, Kikekeller, L’Atelier Óptica, La Californie, Colectivo La Cosa, La Fábrica, Galería Machado-Muñoz, Modernario, Mosaista, Naharro, Natalia Lumbreras, Tiempos Modernos, PCM Design, Rughara Store and Tailak, WeCrave.
