DESIGN WEEK BUDAPEST HAD A GREAT SUCCESS THIS YEAR (16 November 2015)

Almost 7,000 people visited the exhibition “HOME SWEET HOME” in the Museum of Applied Arts in 2015. According to an online survey of the visitors, this exhibition including the exhibition “Collective Imagination” displaying Spanish design as a guest program, which was also linked to the Hungarian Design Award and the Design Management Award, was an absolute must to see for anybody interested in design. The four exhibitions displayed a total number of more than 300 objects and projects of design, offering a valuable educational program to the visitors.

Open Studios with various design studios and workshops introducing themselves every year was again very popular in the series of programs of Design Week Budapest. 15 studios were selected to be involved, deliberately depicting a wide range of fields from interior design to fashion design, or from industrial design to application design in 2015. Like in the previous years, Open Studios, which were occasionally open to visitors at several times and on several days, were very successful, many times attracting a packed house of audience. Visitors also liked the idea of Design Week Coupons with 48 shops in Budapest offering a 20% discount to customers who had a coupon from the program book.

Spain was the honorary guest of Design Week Budapest in 2015. The Museum of Applied Arts hosted two Spanish exhibitions: Collective Imagination displaying Ibero-American designs and Tapas – Spanish Design For Food. The exhibitions were accompanied by a professional event on which a guest lecturer (Erika Nyáry, Spanish architecture and design specialist) and Manuel Estrada, the curator of the exhibition “Collective Imagination” gave lectures. About 60 people attended the event. The third important element of the Spanish honorary guest program was the full-house lecture “Ex-designer” of star designer Martí Guixé at the Moholy-Nagy University of Applied Arts. The star designer illustrated to the audience the importance of a way of thinking that was ready to break up with the conventions and the common patterns of behaviour and object use. Guixé also emphasised in his lecture the approach that could be the most useful for the young generations to adopt at the early stage of their careers.

Programs examining the economic and investment-related aspects of design also ran with a packed house. One of the large-scale programs was the series of lectures and workshops “Create and capitalise!” by Hipavilon Nonprofit Ltd., which was attended by more than 100 people and the roundtable debate “Jam Session”, a joint event of the Hungarian Design Council and MOME+ hosted in the Museum of Applied Arts was also very popular with visitors. The business-related programs of the Design Terminal, the cooperating partner of Design Week Budapest – workshops, lectures and about half a dozen events – received a lot of attention too.

The events of Design Week which are getting more and more popular with the public were largely covered by the media. About 16,500 people followed the programs on Facebook and 2,000 people did the same on Instagram while the series of events were covered 550 times by the media until 15 November. The preparations for Design Week Budapest 2016 have already started.

designhet.hu  facebook.com/budapestdesignweek
instagram.com/budapestdesignweek  twitter.com/BudDesignWeek