Every piece of design has a back-story, every product has a history and every exhibition involves a great deal of preparation. The Bristol Design Festival though has far more going on in the background than could ever be written in a single blog post. Whilst most are out enjoying the seemingly faultless blue skies that late May has brought us, many are huddled in workshops, arched over printers or slicing their fingers with paper-cuts as they try to finish off that last piece of work.
It is simply staggering the effort that is being put into making this year’s festival better than ever. The amount of effort that is put in by the organisers of such a large show could not every justly be summarised, but what about the exhibitors themselves? In the University of the West of England’s Product Design Workshops today, a flurry of students were sanding, sticking and putting the finishing touches to exhibition pieces that could affect their entire career. Here we have projects that have been researched, analysed, prototyped, analysed again and engineered to finite detail, summarised in some cases on a single 2m by 1m board. No pressure then.
Behind them though there is a further level of preparation. Upstairs in a small, hidden room, an exceptionally skilled and committed technician is printing the display boards. It sounds simple enough, but as the majority of people who read this blog will know; technology never quite performs as it is meant to. Colour issues, bleed lines and technical hiccups (the sort that you can never really explain, they just happen) all mean that a great deal of effort is put in just to get the image on paper.
There is yet another level of preparation behind that. The designers create the work, the work has got to be printed, but then the printed work needs to be mounted. Again a simple sounding process, this takes a great deal of time and energy. The boards need to be cleaned and prepared, the paper aligned correctly and stuck, the board trimmed, the frame built, the board attached to the frame… the list continues.
These various levels of preparation are all happening behind closed doors, ready to spring the clean, shiny and thought provoking final product upon the waiting public during the design festival. This is all happening so that the designers can stand there, shake your hand and say ‘this is my work, what do you think?’. UWE though is just one of the contributors to a festival boasting over 500 exhibitors. You do the maths.
In one week, you will have the opportunity to come and see some simply stunning examples of design. I hope you will appreciate how great the Bristol Design Festival is, not just because of the quality or even the quantity of the work, but because of the effort behind it.
On an additional note, today I only got 2 paper-cuts.
Tags: bristol design festival, exhibition, uwe
