The third Madrid Design Festival, Redesigning the World

Since its inception in 2018, national and international audiences have been drawn to the Madrid Design Festival, a forum that upholds the value of design as a means of driving change in society, turning the capital of Spain into a major showcase for international design.
This year’s festival - focusing on the theme “Redesigning the World” - is headed by Álvaro Matías from La Fábrica, with the assistance of the advisory committee formed of Deyan Sudjic (director of the Design Museum, London), Juli Capella (architect), Marisa Santmaría (researcher), Ippolito Pestellini, (partner of OMA), and Pilar Marcos (journalist, editor and professor at the IED Madrid). The festival’s ambitious programme includes more than 250 activities -  including 66 exhibitions and 12 installations - led by over 400 experts to help us decipher the future world. 
The MDF20 festival enables leading lights and emerging talents from the Spanish and international design to address some of the most pressing issues facing society in the near future. The programme will highlight the functional side of design, its power to drive change, its social and educational dimension, new materials, sustainability and responsible consumption. In its third year, the Festival has added new ideas, venues and institutions, driving a discussion to stimulate the creation of a new design culture that will boost the visibility of this “world under redesign”. Therefore, the MDF20 programme includes proposals and initiatives at the local level but go far beyond to solve global matters and major universal challenges that society needs to address.
The Madrid Design Festival will open on 29 January with two exhibitions: “Nature Morte Vivante”, a broad exhibition display of the work produced by the renowned Spanish designer, Patricia Urquiola and “I Work! Because that’s what I’m like”, showing how industrial design has shaped today's world, both at the Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa. Other MDF20 venues include COAM multipurpose cultural space, Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas (MNAD - National Museum of Decorative Arts) and Museo del Traje (Fashion Museum), as well as showrooms, restaurants, hotels and even many of Madrid’s streets and plazas that will host temporary works.
The Explanada del Rey in the Casa del Campo will be a festival highlight with MultiPly, an 8m wooden pavilion that will be built jointly by Waugh Thistleton Architects, the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) and ARUP. This installation is a response to the growing need for housing and to the urgency of the fight against climate change. The proposed solution is a combination of modular systems and sustainable building materials.
“Redesigning the World” is, therefore, a perfect opportunity to feel the pulse of design in the new decade, which we’ll be taking in mid-February when Floornature visits the Madrid Design Festival to meet the key players and go live to tell our readers all about the latest design trends.

Christiane Bürklein

2020 Madrid Design Festival
29 January to 29 February 2020
Madrid, Spain
Images: see captions, courtesy of La Fábrica 
Find out more: https://madriddesignfestival.com/