Join us for the public unveiling of the 2022 Seattle Design Festival August 4, 5-8pm @ the Center, and learn more about what’s to come. Festival staff and organizers will provide an overview of this year’s festival—expanding on the key...
The 2022 Seattle Design Festival will be all about CONNECTION. When thinking about design, there is something very tangible and physical in how things ‘connect’ – but there is also something very emotional that ‘CONNECTION’ taps into as well. CONNECTION...
Admire, pose with, read stories, even add your ideas, stories, or responses to this sculpture which will bridge people from all over the city! The members of Coyote’s Youth Advisory Board created their Teen Resilience Project as a way for...
Join us for a chaotic game of ping pong in the round. Grab a paddle and a friend or seven! Connect directly with other festival-goers by playing this group game. This round ping pong table with a motorized net was...
Track, chart and project your personal connection from where you are to where you’ll go to. This abstract framework, inspired by South Pacific Stick Charts, tells the story of the connecting paths we encounter in our journey through life. An...
Re-think waste streams as you are confronted by your own trash! We build with what we have. In an effort to reduce waste, we propose an installation from found materials. What if design was driven by the resources available and...
The Seattle Design Festival kicks off with a Block Party at Lake Union Park! The Seattle Design Festival Block Party is a two-day street fair celebrating the powerful ways design affects our lives. This fun outdoor event is an opportunity...
Visitors will see large painted textiles that are based on many indigenous cultures around the world. They are touchable, with rich mixed media inclusions. The artist will also tell stories about world events associated with their creation. Deer Creek Studio...
Come play a game with Environmental Works! Push and Pull pegs to prepare a pathway – then score by aiming your ball for the buckets below! Environmental Works invites people to establish connections by way of one of humankind’s most...
Leave your mark on our interactive art exhibit! For this first installation of City’s Canvas, we are exploring ‘Happy Accidents.’ We believe that connection sparks when two ideas, two people, or two groups come together around an idea. Progress is...
In the Beat Roulette arena, your body movements double as instruments! Dance, have fun, and interact with others in the space to create new sounds and music! Beat Roulette highlights one of the most important ways in which we create...
Let’s imagine ecoTHRIVE Housing’s first resilient village together! Join us in visualizing a beautiful community-centered village that is affordable for today, for generations – for good. We will have a large-scale model of our 1.8-acre building site to help us...
Pick a thread of your choice! A connection is made once you weave yours onto a peg interwoven with other people’s threads, creating a beautifully woven design. This abstract connection relates other users’ interests and ideas anonymously to yours. A...
Push and pull different mechanisms along the wall to create a structure where openings and connections appear and dissolve through the interactions! Throughout history, walls have always been built to set boundaries and separate people spatially and socially. The rigid...
Explore how landscape architects use plants to design green, healthy, and inclusive future cities! Imagine what it would be like to be a plant yourself! And create your own radical botanical future landscape! What is your relationship to plants and...
Visit ‘Equipoise’ to connect and socialize! While you’re here, create artistic flags that will be attached to the installation for display throughout the festival! Rooted in Pacific Northwest summertime, ‘Equipoise’ seeks to embrace two identities intrinsically tied to our regional...
Come make a personal connection to the thing that sustains us all: our planet! Forest Net(work) is a pavilion helping us to create a more sustainable world through reforestation. Planting new trees is one of the most effective ways to...
Create a banner that captures elements your own intersectional identity to help build a collective tapestry of hidden connections with other festival-goers. Like the mycorrhizal networks that connect and strengthen apparently individual trees in the forest, this installation seeks to...
Share your favorite places, activities, and memories in and around Seattle through ribbons! Come learn and trade experiences with your neighbors. Discover new adventures in your local community and connect through each other’s experiences. Whether you’ve been in Seattle for...
Fling the foliage! Lob some leaves! Cast a canopy! Help re-leaf our tree. Loop strands over branches to collectively compose a canopy. Together, our combined contributions will weave an unexpected tapestry and result in emergent form. By creating in this...
Foster community connections and collaborate with your neighbors through a shared map of your favorite Seattle experiences. What does post-pandemic look like? One thing that everyone can agree on is that simply emerging may not be enough. So, what is...
View a diorama of the 1909 Seattle Fireboat Duwamish, then proceed across the park to see the real Seattle Fireboat Duwamish at the Historic Ships Wharf! Visitors will encounter an antique trunk sitting on a table in the park. There...
Pulse is a kinetic display that offers a unique sensory experience inspired by the site at Lake Union Park and by each other. Visitors will enter and exit a tunnel-like structure one at a time in a processional fashion, simultaneously...
What’ll Seattle’s residential neighborhoods look like in thirty years? Explore visions for new & reimagined housing types proposed by UW students. Explore student work, data points, and key takaways from a UW graduate architecture research design studio focused on re-establishing...
Follow the Burma Shave inspired road signs around the park until you reach the final destination: the Seattle Fireboat Duwamish, where you can take a free tour of the fireboat! The first set of signs will begin on one side...
Soundscape is inspired by the simple kid’s toy string can telephone, composed of two cans and a taut string. Playing with that concept, this pavilion features hundreds of tin can phones, where visitors can share playful interactions through abstract sound...
Come create a piece of art with us! Explore how we are connected to place, community, art, and self by composing a selection of cube faces, comprising a holistic image. The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) presents an interactive building...
Take a seat inside our cocoon or simply walk through and enjoin the beautiful wooden structure inside! The Cocoon is an all wooden structure designed to provide a space for refuge and rest for every visitor. Architecture students from the...
Up for the Sink or Sail challenge? Design a toy boat, plan for the supplies you’ll need, construct your design and then see if it floats! Compete against other groups, or build on your own. The Sink or Sail: Boat...
Discover new ways to interact and build resilient, transcendent connections! When our world of constant motion was brought to a jarring halt by the pandemic, social interaction gave way to solitude, and ‘IRL’ connection, once the norm, became dangerous, indulgent,...
With a modern + elemental approach, a Koya simply becomes a canvas for your life. What would you do with more space? You are washed in muted light by day, while by night you create a low glow. Connect to...
Our HOTHOUSE debuts neon glass as you’ve never seen it before! Come check out our freestanding sculpture featuring house and plant motifs! HOTHOUSE is a 6ft tall by 5ft wide by 6ft long neon glass tubing representation of a greenhouse...
‘let’s play’ encourages people to interact with and examine the environment within which connections are built upon and reinforced. Through an array of apertures the installation unfurls an evolving tapestry of variation; close and open, conceal and discover, separate and...
Work together to solve this collaborative maze game installation! Labyrinth encourages an environment of cooperation and problem-solving. Participants stand on either side of the maze, one side where the maze is visible and one side where it is obscured. Attendees...
Tie threads throughout the installation to connect yourself with the community and others around you by creating a network of memories! Enjoy the sounds of these connections as they begin to tie into one another and create a web of...
What happens when people come together and use deliberate relationship building and community engagement as a pathway to ending homelessness? Help build a BLOCK Home with The Block Project, a dignified, restorative, affordable, community-based solution to the homelessness crisis. Facing...
Explore the notion of hidden connections, the actions, and reactions that secretly connect us and affect the lived experience of others in our sphere of influence. We are inextricably connected to each other through the world around us and our...
Scale the elephant in the room, and learn about the community of survivors looking to re-enter the workforce. The hard work of defeating cancer is often seen as an unfavorable career gap. But fighting cancer is one of the toughest...
Create chains of connection between meaningful places. Write on paper links about why a place is meaningful to you and add it to the map! Using large printed maps of the Seattle area, we will engage the public in creating...
How can the edge conditions we value redefine Seattle for its post-pandemic era? This pop-up space will act as a conduit for bringing readers both new and existing to ARCADE’s collective dialogue and written work. Last year, ARCADE asked festival...
Creativity fosters connection. Tap into your inner artist and help create a collective masterpiece! You are invited to contribute your own one-of-a-kind painted piece to help complete the larger image on the canvas. Festival-goers are encouraged to design and decorate...
Examine how you engage with public space and come away with techniques that increase ease and fulfillment as well as greater relationships to the spaces we inhabit in daily life! This workshop will offer tools and strategies for increasing awareness...
13 Rabbit is a band made up of veteran musicians, who also happen to be architects, designers, and contractors. Jam out to their mix of rock, soul, and blues! Great summer music is the perfect fit for this year’s Seattle Design...
Spend your lunch (virtually) with SDF August 22-24! Log on from your desk as we stream design sessions and live discussions about CONNECTION with special guests. The mainstage will be a lively and engaging virtual show produced by the Seattle...
A series of programs from our Festival partners in Fremont August 22, Columbia City August 24, and Downtown August 25. Focused celebrations of Seattle neighborhoods and a chance to get to know the design community within them and how design...
Columbia City Connections will feature several interactive tables of different scales highlighting design from small arts and graphic design projects up to site scale through to neighborhood planning! • There will be an interactive presentation of the Ferdinand Festival Street...
We’re hosting a coffee-fueled networking event and brief conversation on low-waste journeys of two Seattle designers and manufacturers – from small wins to sticky hurdles. We’ll talk about the local network of resources for achieving low waste goals, and how...
Children of all ages and their chaperones are invited to a drop-in modeling workshop with the Seattle Architecture Foundation! Seattle Architecture Foundation invites youth to take the lead in a design and modeling challenge inspired by our current exhibit at...
Visit the Seattle Architecture Foundation’s 25th Annual Architectural Model Exhibit, “JUNCTION,” at the Center for Architecture and Design. On display now! JUNCTION is an exhibit hosted by the Seattle Architecture Foundation at the Center for Architecture and Design that features...
Join IIDA NPC Seattle City Center in a downtown Architecture & Interior Design Firm Crawl! Through this group tour, we will visit three architectural firms and one furniture showroom in downtown Seattle. This year we’re part of the Seattle Design...
What’ll Seattle’s residential neighborhoods look like in thirty years? Explore visions for new & reimagined housing types proposed by UW students. Join the UW Department of Architecture and the AIA Seattle Comprehensive Plan Work Group for this panel discussion. Explore...