So the deed is done, the destination is deserted and the design has disappeared.  Until next year that is.  Closing the doors on the Old Fire Station with over 4,500 visitors at that venue alone, this year’s Bristol Design Festival was by far the biggest, and most certainly the best.  As I am sure that a detailed recap of the festival will be published soon, this is just a simple post to say some thank yous.

To all of the sponsors and the supporters who made the festival possible… To all of the volunteers who at times braved the cold and the rain trying to direct unwitting pedestrians into the venues… To the exhibitors who allowed Bristol, nay the world to see just what a creative city we live in and what a diverse range of design we can create… And to the public, who came in their thousands to look, like and love what they saw.  Thank you.

Finally, the BDF will be back next year, and it is your festival.  Tell us what it is you would like to see.  Tell us what you liked best this year.  Ideas, competitions, venues, exhibits… we want to hear your thoughts.  We will be back, we will be bigger, and fingers crossed, we will be even better.

[As with John Bradford, I too must give full disclosure.  A member of the 1K club, I also now work on the Bloodhound Project and am fully biased to how great the project is.]

The West of England Design Forum have always tried to get a wide and diverse range of designer’s to give talks at the city’s Watershed venue, but it is rare that they manage to get product designers and even more rare that they get one working on such a pioneering project.

Mike Turner, one of the lead designers on the Bloodhound SuperSonic Car Project gave a fascinating and thought provoking presentation on Wednesday night on why it is that he does what it is that he does.

His career, to put it simply, is full of interesting projects.  Starting in 1997 with Adtranz designing rail vehicles, he moved his way through the Renfew Group and JCB until he became senior industrial designer working on the JCB Dieselmax World Record Vehicle.  Now running his own company (Mike Turner Design Ltd) he came to the Bloodhound through links made with Dieselmax.  ‘I got bored, so moved on’ seemed to be a concurrent theme throughout his career.

What was interesting was hearing how much of a balancing act his sort of design really is.  Designing the A-Surface bodyshell of the Bloodhound SSC (the surface that interacts with the air) involves continuous liaising between the lead engineer (John Piper) and the chief aerodynamicist (Ron Ayres).  Mike works with the CAD software Alias, trying to make the profile of the car as sleek and as ’slippery’ as possible whilst still accommodating the package that needs to be carried within.

One of the more surprising points that he raised came down to the time that he actually spends on the project.  As each new configuration of the car body needs to go through CFD testing, it could be a case of several weeks between design iterations.  The results would come back from the analysis, twenty to thirty changes would be listed, Mike would redesign the model and off it would go for another round.

What was clear though from his talk was that this project held its own unique constraints.  This is design at its absolute limits.  Very few rules are known.  What is more though, this is a one off project.  This means that there are no manufacturing constraints; each part is bespoke.  Neither I nor the organisers of the event had seen so many questions raised by the audience.  It is a captivating project; one that inspires and begs you to find out more.  Mike Turner only gave a taste of the challenges and complications that building the fastest car on earth holds, but nonetheless it was worth it, just to see where design can take you – to the borders of what is possible.

- Hywel

It is always a real challenge to try and quantify the success of an exhibition launch.  Do you rank its performance on the amount of visitors? The press coverage? The alcohol consumption? Last night the Bristol Design Festival held its launch party at the Old Fire Station, complete with competitions, prizes, speeches, wine, nibbles, music, and everyone seemingly enjoying themselves.  To summarise the launch though, let’s look at a few numbers…

500 – The number of visitors who basked in the warm glow of the spotlights as the third annual Bristol Design Festival kicked off.  The actual number is still being tallied, but at the point of writing this we reached over the 500 mark.

59 – The number of Grafikea Competition Entries on display.  A massive jump again in both volume and quality of the entries.  Some of them are quite simply unbelievable.

10 – The number of pimped Trunki’s that were on display.  As both Trunki and the BDF are celebrating their third year, Trunki is auctioning off the customised pieces in aid of the Festival.

12 – The number of crates of free wine that that aided the merriment and friendly chatter.  The interaction between designers and the public along with the general buzz of the venue was something that is hard to capture in words.

60 – The number of exhibitors in the Old Fire Station alone.  This year the Festival is able to boast over 500 exhibitors in 30 venues across Bristol.

3 – The number of large bags of munchies that were devoured, giving the public another reason to kick back and enjoy themselves in the hub of Bristol creativity.

6 – The number of bags of ice that were used to keep the wine cool.  A small detail, but as all good designers know, it is the small detail that really matters.

250 – The prize fund handed over to the winner of the Grafikea competition.  The competition was fierce this year but made all the more fun by the massive novelty cheque that Neil Ferguson had managed to acquire.

12 – The number of prizes and awards given out during the party.  This included 6 Grafikea, 3 3D Design and 3 2D Design prizes.  All worthy winners, but there are also plenty of worthy mentions.  To see what ones you like though, come and visit!

1 – In the end all of these numbers add up to a single event.  The launch party, whatever you use to quantify it, was a success.  It had a fantastic atmosphere, wonderful people and as with previous years was the perfect showcase of just what Bristol Creatives can do.

This is not the end though for the Festival.  The BDF will be running all the way through until the 11th June.  If you were unfortunate and missed the Launch party, do not worry.  You haven’t missed the event!

It has been a while since I did one of these, so I figured I would explain myself.

With only one exam remaining (tomorrow morning by the way), my focus is now split into two factions; the Bristol Design Festival and the Bloodhound Project.  As Bloodhound does not kick off until the 22nd June, and I have planned blog posts specifically for it, my focus is really on the Bristol Design Festival.

Last year I entered the Grafikea competition.  This year I am doing the same.  And exhibiting.  And volunteering for the event.  And tweeting the event.  And blogging the festival.

This is quite a big involvement on my part, both with preparation time for my exhibition and for all of the other media activities.  Here then are a few links to everything BDF related, so you can keep up to date with the festival and my contribution to it.

The website for the BDF <

The blog of the festival, which I have been invited to guest blog on (and am very grateful for the chance to do it) <

The tweetings of me and fellow conspirators on the events of the week <

Vintage Verity – The Press and PR Manager – An interesting blog worth a look at <

Peter Coles – One of the other bloggers for the BDF <

John Bradford – Another blogger, like me <

Karen Dawe – A great blog writer, who is a member of our blogging team <

A very quick post I must admit, but it should give you plenty to follow from the 5th to the 11th June 2009…

If you want to get involved, like me, here is how you can:

Sponsor <

Exhibit <

Volunteer <

Support <

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.

Last year I attended the Bristol Design Festival; a non-profit event that aims to promote good design in the West of England.  The event was another massive success (it was its second year), and this year’s event is looking to be even better.
Apart from the brilliant atmosphere, excellent hosts and amazing examples of work on show, the event was made all the much better for me personally due to my participation in the Grafikea competition.  This is a good bit of fun where you are invited to buy an Ikea Lack Table and modify it in any way you see fit, then try and sell it whilst it is on show for the week.  My entry last year won second place, but now one of the other designs has come under scrutiny.

Photo Courtesy of Bristol Design Festival

The BDF organisers have been contacted by the world famous Campana Brothers of Brazil, insisting that one of the entries is an infringement of their copyright.  They ask that the BDF “remove such photo…” and “…also ask that such a piece is destroyed and not reproduced again.”

Here is my opinion on the matter.
Personally I believe that the Campana Brothers don’t have a leg to stand on here.  Firstly, it is not the Design Festival that has infringed on anything.  The piece remains the property of the owner and creator, thus anyone exhibiting cannot be charged for infringement.  That is like suggesting that you could take legal action against Panasonic for what appears on your television.
With regards to the photographs, the same issue applies.  As the photographs are of someone else’s work, there is no problem with the BDF showing them.  They own the photographs.  As Flikr always states; you can upload and show photographs as long as you have permission of the owner to do so.  The Design Festival does not own the table, but does own the photographs.  No copyright issues there.

Then there comes the issue of the table itself.  This is the tricky part.  One can claim in this instance that ‘fair use’ comes into play.  Like the Shepard Fairey case over the Obama ‘hope’ poster, the designer here has stated that the piece is inspired by the original, but has taken the work and adapted it in their own way.  If they were not allowed to do this, then anyone who made a square wooden table could attack another manufacturer who constructs in the same style for copyright infringement.  It is ridiculous.

The BDF website asks, ‘Can you copyright the age old art of rolling up bits of paper?’, and is asking for people’s opinions on this.

As the Design Festival is lacking in a comments section, I feel that there should be an outlet for people’s thoughts.  I invite you all to comment your thoughts and feelings on this issue.  What should happen to the Grafikea table?  Defend or Destroy?