The aim of Vienna Design Week is to show and enable people to experience the many-faceted creative work in the fields of product, furniture and industrial design, but also positions of experimental design. Design has been and is an important field in the production of culture: it shapes our material culture, our everyday life and our consumer world, it influences our lifestyles and fashions and most fundamentally our aesthetic sense and judgements. This wide-ranging impact is a reason both to celebrate design and to examine it critically, and VIENNA DESIGN WEEK has made both of these its mission.
In cooperation with many partners – from Vienna museums to production and retail companies to designers from all over the world – the whole of Vienna becomes a platform and showplace of design. Vienna Design Week doesn’t have the character of a trade fair but instead offers a variety of venues and approaches specific to Vienna. The festival sets out to be “international but localised”, with an abiding interest to cooperate with the flourishing design scenes of Central and Eastern Europe, and certainly beyond. Bringing to Vienna an important international design show every October is another example of the long-due international exchange Vienna Design Week is stimulating.
