University community helps drive Dundee Design Festival

The University of Dundee will be at the forefront of next week’s Dundee Design Festival, highlighting the vital role it is playing in the city’s reinvention.

Dundee, the UK’s only UNESCO City of Design, is hosting the first Dundee Design Festival at the former West Ward Works from 25th to 28th May. With a theme of health and wellbeing, including digital, games, textiles, healthcare, social design and architecture, the ground-breaking work will examine how design affects all aspects of our lives.

Students, graduates, academics, artists and designers from the University are leading or otherwise heavily involved in no less than 12 of the 26 talks, workshops, exhibitions and other events scheduled to take place during the festival.

The University’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design features heavily in the programme but less-obvious contributors include staff from the Schools of Humanities and Law and the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID), demonstrating the extent to which design is integral to our communities.

Professor Paul Harris, Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone, said, “We are very excited by the upcoming Dundee Design Festival. University staff, students and graduates being so heavily involved shows the integral role we are playing in Dundee’s transformation from a post-industrial city to an internationally renowned centre of creativity. The designers who work in Dundee have the ideas and potential to change the way we live and we are proud of our contribution to the thriving local design community.

“Duncan of Jordanstone brings together practising artists, designers and researchers, and of course, students, to create a hub for creativity and it has been shown across the world that a thriving arts scene is a factor that makes a city a vibrant and attractive place to live. There is a fantastic approach to collaborative working with other schools from the University and the Design Festival programme is the perfect example of the potential benefits to working in an interdisciplinary fashion.”

Dundee Design Festival will feature projects by architecture and design agency Lateral North, models by Frank Gehry and Kengo Kuma, objects selected by Maggie’s Centre architects including Rem Koolhaas, Richard Murphy and Zaha Hadid, fashion design by Hayley Scanlan and Kerrie Aldo, games by Space Budgie, Guerilla Tea and Fox Wot I Drew, digital design by Slurrp and eeGeo, medical animation by Vivomotion plus Hands of X – a participatory project that brings amputees together with designers and makers to create prototypes of simple hand designs.

The festival, organised by UNESCO City of Design, also features exhibitions by V&A Museum of Design Dundee, Design in Action, as well as playing host to Scottish Jewellery Week, a showcase of the best jewellers and silversmiths in the country.

It is part of a month of activity and creativity in Dundee that includes the University’s Art, Design and Architecture Degree Show, which opens this evening and runs until Sunday, 29th May.

More information about the Dundee Design Festival can be found at www.dundeedesignfestival.com


For media enquiries contact:
Grant Hill
Press Officer
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
Tel: +44 (0)1382 384768
Mobile: 07854 953277
Email: g.hill@dundee.ac.uk