Cardiff Design Festival

The Cardiff Design Festival kicks off this Friday with a launch at the Senedd (featuring former DW editor Lynda Relph-Knight as guest speaker), leading into two weeks of design activity across the Welsh capital.

The festival, which is now in its sixth year, will feature a centrepiece exhibition at The Cardiff Story, showing the Best of the Welsh Design Awards showcase (entries pictured above and below) as well as the Reflecting Wales 2011 show, which will examine ‘some of Cardiff’s unloved spaces’ and Melin Tregwynt’s intriguing design challenge ‘colour a sheep and fill up the field’.

The theme of interaction and fun is carried through to the PlayArk Free Games Day, held at Chapter on 1 October and looking at everything from street games to the latest digital games, and the Design Wars event, on 12 October, which will see tag-teams of designers tackle collaborative design challenges, with the audience choosing the winners.

Alongside these events, a series of exhibitions will look at the whole range of design disciplines. The Building Wales show will look at architecture in the principality while the Sounds Digital festival at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama will celebrate sound design with a range of interactive exhibits.

The festival is also part of the Creative Cardiff initiative, which has been set up with partners including Cardiff Council and the Wales Millennium Centre to promote creativity in the city.

The Cardiff Design Festival runs from 29 September-16 October. For more information visit www.cardiffdesignfestival.org