VERMITTLUNG 2022

“Festivals are places for meeting people and experiencing things. They create informal settings and safe surroundings for exchanging and understanding.” Fully in line with these words in the program, the objective of the wide range of educational events at the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2022 was to take visitors of every age by the hand as they visited design locations and experienced and discussed the act of designing.

The way in which the local color of each year’s Focus District plays a key role in defining the approach of the education program was perfectly exemplified in 2022 by Lucy Li and Angela Neubauer’s highly popular dumpling tour: Visitors joined the two designers with Asian roots as they followed the traces of the Austro-Asian lifestyle through the 6th district and obtained both historical knowledge about the community and extremely practical shopping tips. From classical guided tours of the three festival headquarters to insider tours of well-known and less known locations (Handcraft! Pubs! Architecture!), the program offered dozens of further opportunities for shared experiences that now provide vivid memories. And the pre-festival statement still applies today: “The education program of the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK brings design to the place, where it is most urgently needed – to people.”

A further key concern of the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK is to offer young people the opportunity to develop their own awareness of design. To this end, the focus of the 2022 program for children and schools was to bring the notion of design closer to this target group via playful interaction with other children as much as with adult experts and trained educators. The subjects of the tours for schools are varied: digital matters, urban food supplies, sustainability, and design. And the festival once again provided a handout for teachers, with which they could also lead their pupils through the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK themselves.

For the third year in a row, the VDW22 app allowed festival visitors to plan their own route and playfully navigate their own way across the City Full of Design: collecting points, saving favorites, sharing experiences with friends, and, thus, never losing their overview of their own personal program highlights. New features in 2022 included the virtual portals (AR spots) around and inside the festival headquarters. Large-scale animations of the festival graphic design – gray-beige tubes, pyramids, bubbles – added digital elements to real spaces as a way of inviting visitors to deepen their investigations of the former industrial space at Esterházygasse 22 or the immediate surroundings of the Festival Headquarters in the GEWÖLBE and of the area around the Gänsemädchenbrunnen on the Rahlstiege.