Design Project Vienna – A Design Strategy
International Ideas Competition: How to React to a City?

Call open for applications until 15 January, 2010
 
In a time of economic upheaval and rapid social change design will have an outstanding role in the future. Vienna as an important young design location can make a substantial contribution to this.

The MAK and departure announce a first-time-ever joint ideas competition: under the heading of Project Vienna – A Design Strategy proposals are invited for innovative design strategies and concepts. Design must go beyond mere object modelling and surface cosmetics and be understood as an integral part of cultural creation. Design informs our everyday life, our culture, and our sense of aesthetics beyond fleeting fashions and styles – design is the mirror of our civilization.

The ideas competition targets designers who represent a broad notion of design, who interact with other disciplines or network with artists, architects, and other creative professionals. The focus is on the significance of design as a concrete possibility and relevant practice of intervening in, and informing social structures. After the decline of modernist design utopias and avant-garde attempts at an encompassing redesign of our sphere of living, the call is now for independent and intelligent contemporary models for the Vienna of the 21st century.

The call is for projects, concepts, strategies, and visions that take up the genius loci, that is, use and develop the potential of Vienna – serious or playful, experimental or functional, purpose-oriented or utopian, subversive or factual. What should be in the foreground is the resolution to think in a wider crossover context.

The issue is to intervene in the overlaid and interwoven layers and levels, infra- and substructures of Vienna, to react to existing processes, to redirect deadlocked energy flows, to break up self-perpetuating systems and stagnant situations – and thus to reorganize life in the city.

Applications can now be submitted at www.designprojectvienna.at

Deadline for applications is January 15, 2010. Of all submissions, 20 projects will be shortlisted by a panel of representatives of the MAK and departure before an external jury will select three winning projects. In a special publication dedicated to the results of the Project Vienna – A Design Strategy ideas competition, the 20 shortlisted projects will be comprehensively documented and commented. An exhibition shown at the MAK DESIGN SPACE will be developed together with the three winners.

The ideas competition is part of the project design> new strategies which is a cooperation between departure, the funding institution of the City of Vienna for the creative industries, and the MAK, Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna.