For the past three years, I’ve enjoyed attending the Seattle Design Festival, held around Seattle for two weeks every September. This year, I am disappointed that I didn’t have enough time to check out multiple events (I even missed Park(ing) day!) which is such a bummer.
Regardless, I did make it out to the Block Party which at Pioneer Square with a few of my friends. There were many different installations there designed around this year’s theme: TRUST.
My favorite exhibit at the festival was called OPENhouse designed by NAC Architecture. A heart shaped design was within the house shape and there was a lot of room to play with the exhibit.
Trust the Movement was designed by Studio Meng Stazzara. There was a ball about the size of a pinball, moving around the cityscape based on how you and strangers worked together.
Blind Trust was an exhibit designed by BCRA Design encouraging people to write something vulnerable about themselves on a piece of paper to share it with others. We wrote down some of our fears.
The Trust Maze was a very simple but powerful exhibit where you entered a maze and had two directions to go. The person before you would tell you which way successfully led out of the maze, however, they had the ability to lie to you about the correct direction. We had to decide if we trusted the prior visitor with their directions or not, and then we had to decide to be honest or to deceive the next person through the maze.
Sometimes, my favorite way to document this festival is by shooting photos through the exhibits. With the theme of Trust, many exhibits had transparent aspects to their designs which were very fun to take pictures through.
This Talk to a Stranger exhibit was very cute - Colleen and Chelsea (who I was with) were certainly not strangers, but they had fun reading the prompts to each other anyways.
Leave Your Mark On Seattle attempted to gather opinions from people depending on where they lived in the city. However, I did see some people placing their opinion into many different slots in the map, so the results may have been skewed! Love how this played into the theme of Trust.
The Sticks and Strings exhibit was a fabulous hammock presented by Mithun that had two people laying on a hammock in the middle of pioneer square which was crafted with swimming noodles. It was an interesting take on the “trust fall”.
Another exhibit was called Blind Trust as well (hmmmm it was bound to happen that two companies thought of that title) - this time by Gensler, and architecture firm in Seattle. There were multiple layers of the string that you physically had to move if you wanted to get through.
I can’t wait for next year’s festival and to see what the new theme is!