DMY International Design Festival 2015

“Back to the Future” was this year’s motto of DMY International Design Festival that took place in one hell of a beautiful location – the “Kraftwerk” in Berlin-Kreuzberg.

Apart from the new location, they added a “Professionals Day” to their repertoire, which lead to our Edenspiekermann Partner Robert Stulle opening the festival with a presentation on “Brands in 2015” on that very day.

The whole festival was divided into three sections: Education, Showroom/Exhibition and New Talent. We took some shots of our favorites and are quite eager to share them with you. 

The Education part of the festival offered insights on student work, bachelor and master projects in basically all areas design has to offer.
The Royal Academy of Arts – The Hague showed this year’s INSIDE Master Interior Architecture project called “Welcome to 2065 – the Future of Living”. In highly detailed models they showed their visions of how living culture could evolve within the next 50 years.

Also part of the Education section was Media and Interaction Design from the Hochschule Osnabrück. One of their students – Frederik Ueberschär – created a bracelet that causes a third party to call you if you want to get out of a boring or uncomfortable conversation.

In the Showroom/Exhibition area, MetaformTools, a co-operation of the design studio 7.5, the 3D-printer manufacturer Laydrop and the printing material manufacturer 3dk had a beautiful display of their Metaform operation system, live 3D-printing handy tools (here: wall hooks) due to individual color requests.

Next to the Exhibition area, DMY sponsor Audi had build up their “Open Design Workbench” where different designers would show their working processes and discuss and work with visitors during the festival. On the professionals day, the designers Stefan Reichsteiner and Patrick Rüegg presented their shoe label “VELT” and gave a huge amount of insights on their individual shoe production.

A little hidden on the upper level of the festival was the New Talent area.
Overall, this might have been the most exciting part of the festival, introducing projects as “Recreate Textiles” by the design studio krupka-stieghan. They use industrial cotton waste in order to experiment and create new, bio-based textiles. Founder Katrin Krupka also held a very inspiring presentation on that subject.

Right next to that was an even more impressing project by Valerian Blos who created age indicating food packaging, that is made of synthetic cultivated human skin cells and lives in co-existence with what’s inside. Meaning, that the packaging ages with the beverage and by that immediately shows when the product should not be consumed anymore.

Due to the amazing weather, the garden area was quite a nice addition to the festival, including the portable Poing cardboard table tennis that we didn’t hesitate to use several times (here: Wanja Frank and Robert Stulle).

The DMY 2015 didn’t just give amazing insights on projects and design progress, but also offered plenty of opportunity for the exchange with amazing creative minds.

Photos: Sophie Schlüter