Design Manchester returns on 12-16 November with DM20: Go Global, Stay Local

This year Design Manchester’s annual celebration of creativity and design, DM20, is going global, while staying local, with five commissions through 12-16 November (and beyond) connecting the worlds of design, fashion, sustainability, activism and play.

Being locked down has increased our connectivity, and DM20 embraces the opportunity to work with global partners, devising creative solutions to counter the absence of live events. 

Building on Design Manchester’s partnership with World Design Weeks, DM20, the Go Global, Stay Local Workshop, a  collaboration with the University of Salford and Birmingham City University, will link Salford, Manchester, Berlin, Barcelona and Eindhoven in an interactive online experience, reaching an international audience, via Patrick Thomas and Jonathan Auch’s Open Collab platform. (view event)

Closer to home, as part of Bee in the City’s 50 Windows of Creativity created by Wild in Art, DM20 will showcase what play means to us in our living spaces with the project Playhouse, created by three Manchester design studios, Playground, Ben Clark Design and Barney Ibbotson Illustration. (view event)

Scale-up Sessions (SUS) is a series of events for SMEs and startups organised jointly by Design Manchester and the Business & IP Centre at Manchester Central Library. The three year partnership opens at DM20 with SUS1, titled ‘Pandemic stations: WTF do we do now?’
(view event)

Creative Coalition 2020, by the Creative Industries Federation, will host Shared, Sustainable, Futures, an open access session as part of the REDEFINE strand at the online creative industries festival with DM20 and Manchester Metropolitan University’s SODA. (view event)

MODA-FAD, Design Manchester and the British Council are partnering on a new project spanning DM20 and Barcelona Design Week. the Sustainable Challenge 2020 invites 40 students from Spain and the United Kingdom to develop and present design and fashion projects that focus on gender perspective. (view event)

DM20 will also host a series of gallery tours and talks of its Yours Truthfully exhibition, co-curated by Kaye Dunnings and Malcolm Garrett, for July’s global virtual reality festival, Lost Horizon, created by the team behind Glastonbury’s Shangri-La. The exhibition features work from 70 artists including Jeremy Deller, Anthony Burill, Sarah Boris and Morag Myerscough. (view event)