World Design Weeks is a network which mission is to elevate the global conversation, understanding, education and connection of people with design. This year for the first time members will have a chance to meet in person during the festival that has been distinguished to play an official host. Welcome to Gdynia Design Days!

Welcome to Gdynia Design Days – official host of World Design Weeks 2019

Between 6th-14th of July for the 12th time we will gather together in Gdynia professionals and lovers of good design. City, established as an international sea port in the interwar period, grew into a major urban settlement within just a few years and is now city whose modernist architectural legacy bears witness to the era that shaped it. Then as now, facilitating progress remains, in the eyes of the event’s organisers, one of design’s key objectives. Since 2012, GDD has been run by the PPNT Gdynia | Design Centre. Having started out showing the work of young Polish designers in shipping containers in the city centre, the event now encompasses a wide range of exhibitions, talks, workshops, discussion panels, and film screenings, and, as Poland’s biggest summer design festival, aims to attract not only industry professionals and entrepreneurs but also students and design aficionados.

This year we will meet around slogan POLARISATION. The world around us is a place of encounters between individual interests and the common good. Now it is potent individualism and raging narcissism which mixes with mediocrity, glorifying simplification and reduced access to material goods. Consumerism cannot be combined with minimalism – the same is true of a love of beauty and perfectionism with simple ugliness and imperfection becoming more and more popular. Massive corporations driven by the force of collective workaholism have little in common with a growing group of self-employed freelancers, and influencers absorbed by raising the visibility of their online profiles will fail to find a common language with those trying compulsively to evade Wi-Fi signals. In Gdynia we will seek out alternative materials which are kind to the environment, analysing possibilities for better usage of AI for our age of information overload, considering how to redefine economic ideas in relation to politics, studying more closely the human body as a source of previously unused raw materials, while also asking questions about empathy and knowledge about psychological and physical health of those living beings involved in design. Every dispute can be positive or negative, the key is to manage it effectively.

The intensive exchange of these experience during festival creates opportunity to integrate the world of design. This year we will focus on WDW Network with world-premiering “host festival” concept introduced during GDD. The special program will concentrate on networking and co-designing creative tools aimed to be used by Design Week Festivals. During first weekend of festival (6th-7th) WDW members will have opportunity to enjoy an official GDD Grand Opening with graduation show, speak about the most pressing issues in the design world during thematic block POLARISATION, participate in curatoral tour around 20 exhibitions, network during evening program at House of Ideas, and finalize thematic blockworkshops with Leon Cruickshank from Leapfrog research project at Lancaster University. New approaches will be prototyped and tested during GDD.

Let's meet up in Gdynia, an open minded city, which allows the chance to establish wise dialogue, confronting opposing viewpoints, in line with the interests of various social groups and point the way for further progress.

World Design Weeks Network program

The International host festival of the World Design Weeks starts from Saturday 6 July, 10 am and it lasts until Sunday 7 July, 9 pm at the Pomeranian Science and Technology Park al. Zwycięstwa 96/98 | 81-451 Gdynia, Poland.

The International host festival of the World Design Weeks will be followed by cocktails on 6 of July, from 9 pm at House of Ideas - located in Navy Club „Riwiera” ul. Zawiszy Czarnego 1, 81-301 Gdynia, Poland