Not sure what to propose for SDF 2022: Connection? Learn more about each of our Festival elements and see some examples that the Festival Planning team had in mind when developing this year’s call for proposals! Remember, the Seattle Design Festival is meant to unleash the design thinker in everyone. How will your proposal empower our community to find their path to change-making through design?
Block Party
What it is
A 2-day outdoor public experience in Lake Union Park, featuring unique built installations and pop-up programming like demonstrations, tours, and workshops. The audience is the general public, with high attendance from families and youth.
Our goals
The Block Party promotes a culture of collaboration, encouraging multidisciplinary problem-solving, creating lasting connections among designers from different disciplines, and celebrating design and our greater design community.
What we want
Interactive, fun, provocative, creative, accessible, sturdy, reusable, family-friendly, encourage discussion
Examples
Mighty House
Wemeograph
Build a Community Sculpture with Coyote!
Bloomhouse
Shifting Perspectives
Emerging Gratitudes
See our full list of 2021 Pop-Up and Built Block Party Partners for more inspiration.
Community Spotlights
What they are
Community Spotlights highlight the impact of design on Seattle’s diverse neighborhoods. Each Spotlight includes multiple neighborhood design activities in one community on a single day. Activities might include hackathons and charrettes, walking tours, a scavenger hunt, installations in public spaces, signage and wayfinding highlighting the impact of design, performances, exhibits, films, a progressive party or tour, youth and family workshops, and more.
Our goals
The community spotlights empower communities to leverage design by engaging youth in design thinking, highlighting co-design and community engagement, inviting underrepresented communities into the design process, and modeling design as a career option for youth from diverse backgrounds.
What we want
Interactive, accessible, neighborhood-specific, engaging, community-focused
Examples
Every Building on the Old Kent Road
Imagine Africatown
Map the Square
Design Marks
Atlanta Beltline Latern Parade
East Austin Studio Tour
Virtual Mainstage
What it is
The mainstage will be a lively and highly engaging virtual show produced by the Seattle Design Festival broadcast live online. Selected partners will work closely with a core group of the Festival planning team to develop interviews, performances, demonstrations, and dynamic presentations. Some Virtual Mainstage programs represent months of design engagement, with the festival representing either the start or culmination of a longer-term project.
Our goals
Virtual Mainstage programs demonstrate the relevance of design thinking by creating a vision for our future, exploring or proposing design solutions to community problems, and inspiring action.
What we want
Provocative, inspiring, creative, long-term impact that extends before or after the festival
Examples
See our YouTube Playlist for inspiration!
Thinkercyze: What does it mean to be an Ally? w/ Black Designer at Microsoft
#DrawTogether
Smartbomb Oakland VHS 5
Flatspot Quarterly Raffle
Kenny Beats— The Cave
Never Too Small