#HTE

Dutch Design Week 2020 Opens Tomorrow, Viewable Online

The upshot to the pandemic: You get to check out this year’s Dutch Design Week without having to buy the plane ticket. Opening tomorrow (Saturday, Oct. 17th), this year’s festival may be virtual, but it’ll still pack a punch, offering “500+ 3D Viewing Rooms, talks, virtual routes and DDW TV live from the studio in Eindhoven,” the organizers write. “The virtual festival facilitates connections between designers, professionals and online visitors by offering live chat and livestreams by and with designers.”

The viewing rooms are virtual spaces created by individual designers and loaded with content: Images, video, text and audio. To make navigation easy, visitors start off at a virtual Information Desk where they can zero in on topics that interest them. After concluding your visit to each room, you’re presented with recommendations for other rooms you might like based on your interests.

As with a real design festival, design talks will be held all week long, with the benefit that you can watch them in your underwear. A full list of the scheduled talks is here.

This year’s theme is “The New Intimacy,” which the organizers write “is more topical than ever and steers the festival’s focus on the search for new forms of intimacy during these COVID-19 times.”

For a complete list of this year’s programming, click here.

The start time is Saturday, Oct. 17th at 11am Dutch time (GMT +2), i.e. 5pm EST. When you’re ready to dive in, click here for the opening.