The London Design Festival Celebrates 20 Years This Year- Here’s What You Need To Know
London’s Design Festival, which celebrates all aspects of design and culture, is about to celebrate the milestone of 20 years, and to mark the occasion is making this year’s festival a special 2o year anniversary edition. It’ll run from 17th September until 25th September, with events and tie-ins spread across London.
The festival was originally started to promote the creativity of London, drawing on some of its best artistic and creative minds as well retailers and and educators to make an amazing event dedicated to design. Now attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors from over 75 different countries (back in 2019), the 20th anniversary version aims to showcase how the festival has played a key role in expanding the design industry, and how its helped make London a global hub for design, culture and business.
So, what can we expect from the 20th anniversary celebrations? According to the LDF’s website, “the 2022 Festival will once again shine a bold new light on the city” following tumultuous events like the pandemic, Brexit and the cost of living crisis. There’s an expansive programme of events, exhibitions and participants (too many to list in this article so have a look at their website), all designed to capture the ethos of the festival. One of the most exciting of these is Sony’s Into Sight, a new “life sized media platform inspiration” that use sensory effects and augmented reality and “transform simple boundary surfaces into an infinite vista through shifting light, colour and sound”. Meanwhile, the designer Sabine Marcelis, an artist who’s based in Rotterdamn, will be making her own outdoor public design installation in London, inviting participants to celebrate and appreciate Brutalism and the architecture of modern London.
The 2022 Festival will once again shine a bold new light on the city
Meanwhile, head over to the V&A which is also hosting this fab Korean Wave exhibition, take in even more exhibitions at the official Festival Hub, which the V&A has hosted for 13 years as the London Design Festival at the V&A. The overarching theme will be transformation, with exhibits like R For Repair, which takes broken objects with sentimental value and repairs them by renewing them creatively, and Plasticity, a sculpture made out of recycled ocean plastic to highlight the importance of the environment and the effects pollution is having on it.
The festival also awards the coveted London Design Medal, designed each year by jewellery designer Hannah Martin. Previous winners have included fashion designers like Dame Vivienne Westwood, Grace Wales Bonner, Hussein Chalayan and Sir Paul Smith, as well as architects like Dame Zaha Hadid and Ron Arad.
The festival awards the coveted London Design Medal, designed each year by jewellery designer Hannah Martin…
You’ll also be able to buy the official London Design Festival 20th Anniversary Book, a limited collector’s item that takes a retrospective look at how the LDF has evolved over the years as well as inspired creativity, with memorable art installations like the glowing red lion in Trafalgar Square and 22m tall paper tower outside Festival Hall.
Details of all these events are available on the festival’s website, and those who pre-order the book can pick it up at a special reception on 21st September.
HEAD OVER TO THE LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL’S WEBSITE
FOR MORE FROM THE V&A, CLICK HERE
