Winnipeg should be a city for prototyping New Ideas

(Winnipeg, MB., May 29th, 2019) –  StorefrontMB is pleased to announce the theme of the 2019 Winnipeg Design Festival (2019 WDF), PROTO-, with Jae-Sung Chon as acting curator. Following the theme, 2019 WDF will focus on encouraging, embracing, celebrating, and respecting the idea of the ‘first-in-time’ or ‘first-of’ within Winnipeg’s dynamic design culture.

Winnipeg Design Festival is the largest annual event of StorefrontMB, a not-for-profit initiative focused on exposing the strengths within the local design culture. Since its inception in 2011, the festival has fostered an ongoing growth of public awareness and appreciation towards the rich community of talented individuals and groups, and their outcomes, in various fields of design working in Winnipeg. Past participants and speakers include 5468796 Architecture, 1×1 Architecture, Public City Architecture, Thom Fougere, Lennard Taylor, Freya Bjorg Olafson, and John Patkau.

This year’s festival will be curated and directed by Jae-Sung Chon and his design team STUFF (Studio for Transformative Urban Forms and Fields). Jae-Sung believes that Winnipeg should be a city for prototyping new ideas! “Let’s rebrand Winnipeg as a proto-city: a city where new ideas are encouraged and embraced, as its core urbanism.” He thinks that Winnipeg’s year-round festivals and events are fuelled by the experimental spirits that the city has always embraced. “Winnipeg has always been a place where new ideas and unlikely alliances are forged and accepted, from the time of its settlement (the Forks) through the legacy of its modern architecture (WAG), which continues today (CMHR).”   As an educator (a faculty member at the Faculty of Architecture University of Manitoba), Jae-Sung emphasizes the importance of fostering a culture that embraces ‘young-emerging-(proto) ideas’, a critical ingredient for the cultural growth. “Winnipeg can become a city of perpetual festivity, a living laboratory, a campus full of young/fresh ideas, where one learns and grows through living the proto-urban conditions.”

The 9th annual festival’s program will attract a wide range of disciplines and industries, including Fashion, Food, Industrial Design, Engineering, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design, Graphic Design and Urban Design. Event programs and installations will be platformed during the festival, September 26th to 28th, and a set of public participation programs and media programs are planned to activate the city before and during the festival.

Several new programs are being planned this year, including the inaugural WINNIPEG DESIGN FESTIVAL AWARDS. The curatorial team plans to work with an Inuit Artist to design the award’s trophies that will be awarded to selected designers during the festival. The specifics of the award categories and their decision processes will be announced in the near future.