Eight highlights from Dundee Design Festival 2024

Airplane seat covers designed for neurodivergent passengers and a knitted landscape filled with giant mushrooms were among the designs shown at this year’s Dundee Design Festival, Scotland’s biggest design event.

The festival, which ran from September 23-29, celebrated the 10th anniversary of Dundee’s UNESCO City of Design status with installations and designs from over 180 local and international designers.

For its fifth edition, the Dundee Design Festival revisited a former factory space in the Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc to showcase over 70 objects, from lighting and furniture to textiles and industrial design.

The festival came up with an ambitious sustainability strategy and used less than 15% new materials to build the event space, exceeding its maximum target of 30%.

This was achieved by reusing exhibition materials from V&A Dundee and using mist paint stocks donated by paint companies Craig & Rose and Crown Decorators.

Here, we’ve rounded up eight highlights from the festival:

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The Wild Wooly Beastie of the Law by Donna Wilson

Donna Wilson, who hails from Aberdeenshire and currently resides in London, created a ‘woolly wonderland’ filled with knitting trees, giant mushrooms, flowers and a strange-looking creature with hair that appeared to be vacuumed through ducts of air

Further down the ducts, the creature’s woolly hair fell into a knitting shop, where visitors could knit it into an “endless” scarf.

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Lost and Found by Brown Office

Scottish design studio Brown Office used 3D printed colorful elements to transform discarded materials such as pizza boxes, postcards and glass bottles into a traveling pop-up installation.

The colorful 3D printed castors, pole connectors and wall mounts have been designed to be lightweight and easy to transport so they can be combined with found objects from where the installation was assembled.

“One of the challenges I set for myself was to create a resource-light facility that could fit inside a suitcase,” said studio founder Dean Brown. “As much as it looks great physically when assembled, it breaks down to be very light and small so you can create nimble pop-up displays.”

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Sensation Concept Airplane Seat Cover by Jamie O’Donnell for Muirhead Leather

Created for Scottish leather company Muirhead Leather, designer Jamie O’Donnell presented airplane seat covers with soothing colored surfaces and textures, intended to make flying a less stressful experience for neurodivergent passengers.

The covers feature clearly labeled seat numbers on the head cushions and an embossed geometric pattern on the outer seat panels where the passenger’s hand would fall.

“Air travel is stressful for anyone, but especially for those with heightened sensitivities like neurodivergent people,” O’Donnell said. “As Muirhead Leather’s lead aviation designer, I wanted the company to be less about trends and more about people-centric passenger experiences.”

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Hyper-local

To mark Dundee’s 10th anniversary as a UNESCO City of Design, the Hyper-Local exhibition brought together 50 designs representing other cities that hold the UNESCO title.

The exhibition was initiated by Dundee Design Festival Creative Director Stacey Hunter and co-curated with the UNESCO Creative Cities network, featuring designs from Bilbao in Spain, Detroit in the US, Graz in Austria, Kortrijk in Belgium, Nagoya in Japan, Querétaro in Mexico. and Wuhan in China.

Among the objects were Chinese New Year dragon sculptures, overalls from Detroit workwear company Carhartt, Japanese bento boxes and screen prints informed by Mexican traditions.

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AdesignStorie Wellness House

Interior design studio AdesignStorie created an installation for the ecological home with two wooden structures and a table of materials of the future showing 51 samples of biomaterials, with the aim of encouraging visitors to think about how they impact houses in their well-being and the environment.

One of the structures contained the floor plan of a small house with information on sustainable building materials, while the other hosted workshops on sustainable design.

“There’s less material needed to build tiny houses and less energy needed to heat them, so they’re inherently low impact,” said studio founder Alicia Storie. “They are also often close to nature, which has benefits for well-being.”

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A challenge to the uniformity of Gabriella Marcella

Glasgow designer Gabriella Marcella created a series of five eye-catching dresses with customizable details informed by how they could be used in different careers and environments.

Designed with people working in alpine environments in mind, Alpina’s uniform (pictured above) featured flag-like panels that can be moved and modified to communicate signals to others on the slopes. Other designs included uniforms for painters and decorators and a Dazzlesuit, designed to disguise the identity of the wearer, which would suit celebrities.

“I allowed myself to get lost in the fantasy of what these could be when you wear them, with no limits to what normal life or a normal uniform would allow,” Marcella said. “They defy logic and reality.”

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bookend

The story of Dundee journalists Marie Imandt and Bessie Maxwell, who embarked on a 10-country world tour in 1894, informed the summary of the Bookends exhibition.

The exhibition featured 20 pairs of stands designed by Scottish designers, each responding to Imandt and Maxwell’s journey and the journalism they produced.

Among the designs were a pair of hands cast from present-day Scottish female journalists by Jennifer Gray, slabs of native Scottish material designed by Adam Johnston to resemble stacks of books and models of two scouts made from recycled newspaper by Lauren Morsley.

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Spree by Martin Campbell and Emer Tumilty

Furniture design studio Martin Campbell collaborated with Glasgow artist Emer Timilty to create Spree, a collection of colorful wooden furniture with voluminous geometric shapes.

Made as an initial concept that the design pair aims to develop further, the furniture was stained in bold colors that let the natural grain of the wood shine through.

“Often you have furniture presented that is very finished and at its final point, but hopefully it’s more accessible and we get ideas from other people,” Campbell said. “These pieces could be tables or seats if they were scaled down, or they could have storage—we’re leaving that as an open conversation.”

Photography by Grant Anderson.

The Dundee Design Festival took place at the Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc, Dundee, from 23-29 September 2024. See the Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place across the world