Piet Hein Eek, Irma Boom, Ben Reason, Andreu Carulla, João Albuquerque (BIG), Sara Ricciardi, OUCHHH, Pierre Jorge Gonzalez de Gonzalez Hasse – ASS, Quayola, Oteyza, and Birgitte Due Madsen will be among the professionals participating in the conference.
Madrid DesignPRO, the professional days of the Madrid Design Festival, will bring together essential figures of national and international design at the Madrid Free Education Institution from February 14 to 17, in various formats including round tables, conferences, anatomy lessons, and conversations.
These professional conferences are held within the framework of the Madrid Design Festival and will take place at the Madrid Free Education Institution.
“At MDF, we aspire to give a voice to designers who address issues that strongly shake our current situation. In this edition, we focus on design and conversation, highlighting the role of design as a powerful tool to initiate dialogues, promote collaboration between disciplines, and address problems from a global perspective,” says Álvaro Matías, director of the festival.
Through conferences, round tables, and meetings, Madrid DesignPRO will emphasize the role of design as a powerful tool to initiate dialogues, foster collaboration between disciplines, and address problems from a global perspective. Additionally, Annalisa Rosso, Oteyza, and Paul Cournet have curated three dialogues with other designers around topics such as design, industry, crafts, performing arts, and sustainability.
These days are sponsored by the Community of Madrid, which once again chooses our festival to highlight innovative proposals in industrial, product, and strategic design in our region. In addition, they have the support of Acción Cultural Española through the PICE Visitantes program.
Great design professionals in Madrid DesignPRO:
Piet Hein Eek
Dutch industrial designer who works with recycled and waste materials, generating a dialogue between applied arts, design, and crafts. His studio, located in a former Philips factory in Eindhoven, has become a creative hub with restaurants, showrooms, galleries, shops, hotels, and workshops where he designs and manufactures for the world.
Irma Boom
Irma Boom (Lochem, Gelderland, December 15, 1960) is a Dutch graphic designer, typographer, and illustrator, specializing in making artist books with often very unusual materials, formats, or designs. In 2001, she won the Leipzig Gutenberg Prize in recognition of her entire career. In 1991, she founded the company Irma Boom Office, channeling her commercial and artistic work with great international impact.
João Albuquerque, partner of BIG Bjarke Ingels Group
The Danish architecture studio BIG (BIG Bjarke Ingels) participates in the Madrid Design Festival with Actiu, a furniture brand, to explain some of its most representative projects. The Copenhagen-based studio works from Barcelona on different projects led by João Albuquerque, founding partner of the sub-headquarters. Their projects are characterized by the mixture of common ingredients such as living, pleasure, work, shopping, and the combination of three important sectors: social, economic, and environmental. They are currently one of the most important architecture firms in the world.
Ben Reason
Ben Reason is the co-founder of the pioneering service design studio Livework. His experience is based on digital design and user experience focused on services. In recent years, his career has shifted towards helping companies generate services focused on humans and the planet. His participation in the PRO will be about how to face, through design, this new era in which humans must curb their impact and footprint on the planet.
Sara Ricciardi
Sara Ricciardi, originally from Campania (Italy) and Milanese by adoption, is a versatile designer. She designs products for galleries and art and design companies, interiors for stores and hotels with a strong scenographic imprint, installations, and performances. She studied product design between Milan, Istanbul, and New York. She has been honored by the Triennale di Milano, Wallpaper, and Elle Decor for being one of the most compelling voices on the contemporary design scene.
Ouchhhh Studio
Ouchhh Studio excels in new creative media, innovating at the nexus between art, science, and technology for more than a decade. They are pioneers in data-driven art, such as data paintings and sculptures, exploring the mysterious origins of their fields. Its team, made up of engineers, academics, and artists, shares a vision: knowledge becomes poetic public experiences, shaping a futuristic perspective.
Pierre Jorge Gonzalez
Pierre Jorge González and Judith Haase were the founders of AAS in 1999, a Berlin-based studio whose main practices are architecture, scenography, and lighting. His early work with Richard Gluckman and Robert Wilson for the Watermill Center in New York became the first of many highly regarded projects with contemporary artists, curators, and collectors. His work includes large artwork installations, luxury retail interiors, residential extensions, and conversions of industrial and art-related spaces.
Andreu Carulla
Andreu Carulla (Banyoles, 1979) is one of the great names of industrial design in our country and currently internationally, thanks to his broad, transversal vision of the discipline. Thanks to the diversity of its proposals. In this edition of the Madrid Design Festival, he participates together with Amazon in the installation of Fiesta Design, as well as giving the talk “Ancestral Design,” where he proposes a deep reflection on how design can be the catalyst for the rebirth of traditions, transforming their role in society.
More information about the program: MadridDesignPRO
Madrid Design Festival 2024:
The seventh edition of the Madrid Design Festival will once again make the capital a benchmark for this discipline, between February 8 and March 17, 2024. The alternative creation environments, the unifying force of design, and the dialogue or understanding between professionals, companies, and institutions are the pillars of this new edition that brings together, to date, 53 exhibitions and installations; 177 brands, institutions, and spaces and the participation of 695 professionals in the next edition of 2024.
In this edition, and under the common motto of the previous ones ‘Redesign the world,’ MDF wants to reclaim design as the tool capable of promoting dialogue and providing a new look at the problems and circumstances that mark everyday life, providing solutions of a design table.
In this way, the Madrid Design Festival will put design in dialogue with disciplines ranging from science, fashion, music, art, and crafts, but also from design, we will talk about issues that impact and affect society such as depopulation or loneliness in young people. A conversation that will materialize through exhibitions, installations, and meetings with the main figures of national and international design and that will turn Madrid into the epicenter of European design during February.