The 2024 Design Shanghai @Xintiandi Design Festival is set to take place from the 14th to the 30th of June. This year's festival will revolve around the theme of "Hybrid Playground". We eagerly anticipate a diverse array of creative minds coming together to make this festival a landmark event in the city's design landscape.
2024 Design Festival Theme:
Hybrid Playground
The relationship between festivals and play is, as it should be, very close. Both announce the stagnation of (or a break from) ordinary life; both are, for the most part, dominated by joy and pleasure; both are bound by time and space; and both combine strict rules with true freedom.
The Xintiandi Design Festival, now in its eighth year, provides designers a “playground” where they can “play” with fun, freedom, and experimentation outside of their daily practice. Furthermore, this is where the public can enjoy their very own "playtime", escaping the routines of urban life and expressing their creativity.
On the one hand, almost all industries are experiencing a rapid and profound transformation brought about by digital change, which is upsetting the balance and blurring the boundaries between different industries. Boundaries in the traditional sense are no longer boundaries.
On the other hand, the significance of interdisciplinary research has become more and more important in the context of expanding knowledge boundaries, coupled with the rapid development of contemporary science and technology. This relates to how we can navigate our way through the diverse agendas of modern society, as we research how different disciplines intersect, merge, and converge.
Design, as a means of collaboration and connection between different disciplinary backgrounds, such as Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Biology, Physics and Medicine, can provide an open space and time for all to engage with each other more freely. This way we will be able to string together and realise these very imaginations and creativity, which are otherwise difficult to achieve in their original disciplines. All collaborators will inject fresh vigor into "design" with content domains and rules from their own disciplines, breaking down boundaries even further.
Founder of Vestibule Consulting & Little-Known, Guest editor of OuiArt, Executive Editor of Shanghai Articles, Columnist, Curator, Senior Media Professional
2024 Installations
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)