About the festival

2018 falls as a reflective year and as such the programme, Dundee Design Festival presents…has three core elements.

Factory Shop, Dundee Design Parade and PechaKucha Night TAKEOVER.

The Dundee Design Parade will be unlike anything that Dundee has seen before. A riot of colour and noise weaving its way around the city centre to celebrate Dundee’s place in the global family of UNESCO Creative Cities in this, Scotland’s Year of Young People 2018.

Dundee Design Parade is supported by the Year of Young People event fund, managed by EventScotland, part of VisitScotland’s events directorate.

Factory Shop

In partnership with Tilde Arts, Dundee Design Festival presents Factory Shop, a temporary exhibition and workshop space in the centre of Dundee.

One of the successes of the previous two festivals was how the event used design to reignite the vast former factory at West Ward Works into a potentially more sustainable cultural venue for the city. The UNESCO City of Design Dundee team aim to repeat some of this success by taking over a vacant high-street property in the city centre to bring you Factory Shop.

Factory Shop is an exhibition of prototypes and products made in factories by designers Dawn Youll, Florence Dwyer, and Tommy Perman & Simon Kirby. The exhibition marks the culmination of the first Dundee Design Festival ‘Factory Residency Programme’ launched in 2017 in partnership with Make Works.

The venue will also play host to several design-related events and workshops throughout the week exploring design alongside lots of hands on making and doing sessions.