The question of scale should be one that ought to give pause to most design events and conclaves around the world. The question—as pertinent and timely as it is now—had everything to do with extravagance, grandiose showcases and an oblique definition of luxury in the not-so-distant past. That past too is highly selective; a cohort of design shows still follow rather dated syntaxes and unfortunately, serve little purpose beyond annual gatherings of the elite. The unsubtle distinction between trade fairs and design shows is not lost on me either while I write this. That defence is equally dated since the notion of trade has evolved in a world that struggles between a part of it seeking to radically redefine the business of design itself and another that refuses to move beyond business over handshakes in closed boardrooms. A dichotomy between classic and novel, comfortable and radical, the old and the young is clearly visible; and while it’s mostly signatory for the baton to be passed from older designers to newer, younger, more exciting ones, perhaps there is the same to be said for the arenas and the centres that host said showcases of design if we are to hope for the kind of change that design aspires to, on paper.

The obvious fulcrum (and to some, the epitome) of the pointedness of this old order is the Milan Design Week—arguably the world’s most influential design showcase—the elephant in the room that may just have metamorphosed into a monster. The design week’s somewhat unchecked growth across Milan’s districts reached a tipping point this year as one of its chief districts, Alcova, set camp beyond the outskirts of the city. The euphoria of a design week, to those of us it appeals to, can quickly escalate this way into hysteria; and while Milan hasn’t been quite big on sustainability considering the hype surrounding it and quite simply and primordially, the sheer volume of air traffic the city handles for that one week at the outset, the term has, for better or for worse, entered the vocabulary of its programming and stuck there for a good part of this decade. As that and similar other setups around the world with little scope for anything beyond business as usual (the London Design Festival is not far behind) appear to be bursting at their seams, the more viable solution for the all-encompassing “future of design” may seem to be an urgent de-escalation and in scale, first of all. Until we deal with the impracticability of that and the perceived impossibility of disruption of the established order—and the accompanying furore —what may perhaps be the more viable solution indeed is to count on the “underdogs”, the local producers and the “smaller players” to get it right on nimble budgets and lean resources. Sustainability then, especially within the purview of showcases of design as it turns out, has always been a product of reduction, of less, of doing more with that less. You sustain, over extended periods, of shortage and abundance and for whatever the next is. If done sustainably enough and hear me out on this, the next big thing in design is what we design today.

The question of scale then has to go hand in hand with that of sustainability in design programming, beyond the object displayed, beyond the talks programme and pedagogy production. That is not to say that small scale necessarily equates to good, but along with other parameters on the lines of embodied ethos and impact—both ‘pre’ and ‘post’—and a more holistic assessment, it surely would seem so. Naturally then, when the Dundee Design Festival 2024 came bearing the moniker of the world’s most sustainable design festival, I was intrigued, but also charged in more journalistic ways to instinctively dismount what comes across more as a provocation than a claim. A visit to Dundee, the UK’s only city accorded UNESCO City of Design status, meant a slight unravelling, but of the notions of what makes a design festival and what design may come to mean for a community of design enthusiasts, students and craftspeople; what it means for a city with a faint spot on the map of global design circuits (certainly not as much as London) despite pioneering local talent.

The festival’s opening marked not only a decade of Dundee being accorded the UNESCO City of Design status, but also a similar timeline of upholding what drives the riverside town’s connection with design. Historically speaking, that connection has been rather intrinsic from Dundee’s thriving textile scene, particularly jute, tying back to colonial trade with India - a history duly acknowledged in several institutional forums including the V&A Dundee (a disarming concrete edifice by Kengo Kuma) where my discovery of the festival began. It is also an indictment of the values of Scottish design that, non-exhaustively, bear a trademark understatedness—especially when juxtaposed with its counterparts in British and English design—and slightly veer away from industrial design and production to the allure and individuality of craftsmanship, along with the astute act of making with hand. It is, for all intents and purposes, another nod to the wins of the smallness in scale of design, while also bearing a nascent but traceable kinship and analogy to shared roots in pre-independence India.

Part of the festival’s diverse design programming includes installations, interactive sessions with designers, talks and workshops along with the usual showcase of design objects spanning furniture, interiors, jewellery, homewares, craft, graphic design and fashion, all set within the Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc. Of particular (and peculiar) interest was BOOKENDS, comprising 20 new eponymous objects commissioned to different designers responding to the book, Dundee's Two Intrepid Ladies: A Tour Round the World by DC Thomson's Female Journalists in 1894. The text details their travels and findings across the world, while the designers sought inspiration from the landscapes and cultures the two Dundonian women encountered. As objects with specific and dictated functions, the 20 designs swung between eccentric, abstract and austere, each within the larger ethos of the festival honouring craft. The chief showcase of design objects was tent-poled under FRAMEWORK comprising 70 Scottish designers and their works, intended as a “snapshot of contemporary Scottish design”. On the other hand, HYPER-LOCAL provides a more international platform for design, bringing together works from seven other UNESCO Cities of Design including Nagoya (Japan), Bilbao (Spain), Kortrijk (Belgium) and Detroit (USA) alongside Dundee.

That unmistakable sense of craft and hands-on engagement was, for me, one of the defining tenets of the Dundee Design Festival. Hosted at the Michelin factory space and free to attend for visitors and patrons, the festival spanned roughly 10,000 square metres of industrial space powered through a series of massive windmills installed on-site. Another logistical capstone here is that the festival decked out only about a fifth of its build using new, virgin materials, opting to reuse and recycle the overwhelming rest from previous events and donations from collaborators and patrons, amplifying the optics of the festival being a tight-knit community showcase and celebration first, a platform for Scottish design second and everything else after. However, the provocation in the “world’s most sustainable design festival” is rather earned here through a more ethical engagement—one that supersedes the logistical in several ways—with the mammoth idea of sustainability in design. A sit-down session with Dr Stacey Hunter, Creative Director for the Dundee Design Festival (at the festival’s closing party, nonetheless), bolstered the same ideas of the inherent ethos of sustainability in design fair and how it can be springboarded into other tangible expressions of the term, including the aspiration of Dundee hosting the world’s most sustainable design festival. “I like to work with people in a collaborative way, in a friendly way. I think we're all in an ecosystem, we're all in a community. So the way that that kind of manifests itself in terms of the sustainability aspect of the festival is quite a common-sense approach, where I think of it as a matrix. It intersects across lots of different areas,” she states.

“Instead of just thinking about taking a very technocratic approach and talking about the carbon weight of this or the air miles of that, it's actually thinking about it in terms of what we, as non-experts—not scientists, not engineers—as curators and public programmers can do in our community, in our ecosystem that has an immediate impact,” she continues. Among attendees, over 180 designers and 14 DJCAD graduates showcased the very best of Scottish design across a series of design exhibitions. Especially refreshing was the turnout, equal parts locals as well as professionals from the field that served to be a potent reminder of the inherent sustainability in local connection and produce. The talks programme works similarly, giving the stage to Scottish designers to be in almost direct dialogue with attendees. What that also does, intently, is minimise talent mobilisation internationally, which is—and not by a long shot—the festival’s way of looking inwards while producing work that caters to definitively placing Scottish design on the global map. To that, Hunter states, “I want our expression to be an authentic expression of what is happening in Scotland. We don't have lots of money to spend on the festival and we have a sustainability commitment. So, for me, the idea of flying in international speakers didn’t really feel right. HYPER-LOCAL has 50 objects from around the world and I think that's a more meaningful way to have an international angle to the festival”.

Within that keen sense of community, it was endearing to see the festival’s participatory facet, with a lot of the hands-on programming extending to the attending public, including screen printing with Timorous Beasties, making biophilic design with AdesignStorie. "I think that what we have created here and hopefully the atmosphere that you feel when you're here, is one where your feelings and your experience as a visitor have been thought of. I believe that we have managed very well to not be elitist about design and to make design something that's very accessible for people who are coming here; who maybe haven't ever been to a design festival before and maybe think that they're not that interested in design. We're really hopeful that by participating in some of our activities and workshops, people feel inspired—if not to become designers themselves—to take up a craft, or might encourage their children to go to art school or design school," Hunter states on the public programming of the festival, with the idea of interaction inexorably connected to and embodied by the term’s former half - public.

Dundee is often—and rather colloquially I might add—termed the city of Jute, Jam and Journalism. Its post-industrial heritage has opened up several avenues for the city to a near integrative transformation, while still retaining its roots. In a somewhat warped sense, through the festival and my short exploration of the city, I could mostly associate Dundee with labour; not toil, but labour. In that correlation, working and doing (and designing) were acts of pride and so were the proverbial fruits of that labour, the designed object. As an outsider, one feels that swell sense of a job well done with the festival, instead of the usual overwhelming sprints from pavilion to pavilion fuelled by the fear of missing out. In that, is the tag of the “world’s most sustainable design festival” then a claim or a provocation? Perhaps neither, but it may be something more or less precisely in the middle. It is an aspiration and that seems to be a good enough starting point.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)