About the festival

Gdynia Design Days is a festival about finding solutions to current challenges through design. It culminates in events and exhibitions held during the summer, but we are active in the field of design all year round, including organizing meetings, discussions, lectures, and exhibitions.

At Gdynia Design Days, we believe that design is a tool for change, allowing us to create solutions that are good for people and the planet. Design is not elitist, it is for everyone, democratic. That's why we want to include as many people as possible from different backgrounds in the design processes and discussions about them. We show both bold projects from the area of speculative design, as well as real solutions and processes, proving that design concerns each of us. We want to build individual responsibility and social solidarity, and we focus on locality in our activities.

As the Gdynia Design Days team, we are not afraid of self-reflection and change. The values we talk about during the festival, we try to implement in our daily work. We are constantly learning, making mistakes and learning from them. We want everyone to feel comfortable and invited to build together the reality we live in during Gdynia Design Days.

DISPERSION

We are everywhere and nowhere in particular. It is easy to overlook the fact we are following a vague path, one that is not illuminated by a strong and coherent idea.

The resources and solutions are within our reach, but not yet firmly in our grasp. The global scale and diversity of challenges compel us to experiment, to seek answers in multiple places at once. In the midst of polycrises and an accelerating modern world, we are unable to capture them all. So, let’s stop for a moment and take a look around. Perhaps we no longer need to keep searching?

Just as Gdynia was originally conceived as a remedy for the ailments of industrial-era cities, social hardships and political constraints, so, too, we now dream of a new direction towards something better. Our hope lies in design. Its potential and its responsibility in shaping the present will strongly resonate throughout this year’s edition of Gdynia Design Days. We will use one of Poland’s most significant design festivals as a platform to discuss the idea we need in order to make wise use of the tools we already have. Once again, Gdynia’s exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and various exchanges of knowledge will inspire new initiatives for a better tomorrow.

pause, observe, and understand

We do not fully grasp the place we find ourselves in today. We are lost in a cacophony of voices and overlapping narratives, in the ongoing redefinition of expertness. Alarming results of scientific research, followed by directives and social expectations, leave designers facing what may well be an impossible task. Sustainable, inclusive, universal, speculative, post-humanist design… What do these terms actually mean? Do they have a common denominator? We need to clarify which challenges we are both willing and able to respond to. How should we design, and for whom? Should we continue searching for something new, when we have already developed countless innovations?

find your internal focus

To fully focus on something or someone seems like a generosity in an era when notifications, tasks, and expectations constantly compete for our attention. No wonder we struggle to prioritise global challenges when it is so easy to lose ourselves in the stages of personal growth, somewhere between the gym, language courses, new film releases, and bestselling books. We are slowly beginning to recognise the overstimulated nature of our relationship with new media, to feel our own misalignment with the conditions we have created for ourselves. But what exactly is not working? How can we avoid harming ourselves and our surroundings? How can we regain focus, that most precious of resources?

decentralise

Dispersion prompts us to consider what would happen if resources were decentralised. What if we re-evaluated the role and potential of small towns and districts distant from key hubs and connections? We stretch urban fabrics, expanding suburbs and city outskirts, yet we struggle with the consequences: accessibility, quality of services, cultural and public life, logistics. How can we responsibly build contemporary and future urbanity – including its small-scale forms?

keep asking – solutions will come in time

This year’s GDD will be a truly special one. The festival has matured – it is celebrating its eighteenth birthday – and so we are proposing a subtle transformation. Instead of competing to offer the best innovations, we intend to open up discussions and question ideas. Too often, we succumb to the pressure of immediate reaction, trying to keep up with the next wave of challenges. This time, we invite you to engage in open debates, to contest, and to reflect. Let the questions raised during the festival linger in your minds for months to come, allowing the ideas to ferment. Next year, we will meet again – this time, thinking in terms of solutions.

We believe that design can be an instrument of change. We want to inspire business, designers and our audiences to act, using design as a tool for efficient and sustainable growth. We are convinced that an open mind and a mindful approach may lead us to new solutions, which are so desperately needed today.