The eighth edition of the Herald Design Forum next month will be dedicated to sharing ideas about how to design not just a better but a sustainable future.

Under the theme of “Designing Future,” 15 internationally renowned speakers will share their experiences, discussing the latest changes in their respective fields and how they are preparing for the next wave of changes to come. 


Herald Design Forum 2018 will take place Sept. 14-15 at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza.

The upcoming forum will start off with a speech by Princess Dana Firas, the chairperson of Petra National Trust, a Jordanian nongovernmental organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of cultural heritage.

A strong advocate of cultural heritage preservation, Dana will give a talk under the title of “Designing Future, Inspiring Past.” During the speech scheduled on Sept. 14, Dana will reiterate the importance of preserving the inheritance from the past and also how we can make sustainable future through that.

Also speaking at the forum on the first day is Peter Zec. Founder and CEO of Red Dot Award, Zec will give a talk titled “Simplicity: the power of design,” delving into what makes quality design, along with how the design principle of simplicity has impacted the past and the present. He will also discuss how simplicity will continue to have an appeal in the future.

Helming the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen, Germany, which has hosted a design competition since as early as 1955, Zec is widely known for having transformed the then national competition into an international platform, the Red Dot Award.

This year’s Herald Design Forum will feature several “starchitects.” The presence of internationally renowned architects is expected to offer the audience a glimpse into how cutting-edge architecture is pushing the boundaries through innovative design.

British designer Thomas Heatherwick, founder of Heatherwick Studio, is among the star architects who will be speaking at the forum. Heatherwick Studio is widely known for such projects as the Google campus and Coal Drops Yard in London’s King’s Cross, a new shopping district and public space in the old rail hub slated to open in October.

A star among the younger generation of Japanese architects, Junya Ishigama is linked with the architecture family tree that traces its roots back to Toyo Ito and includes Kazuyo Sejima, who he apprenticed with the former in 1990s. Having worked with Sejima from 2000 to 2004 at Sanna after winning the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, Ishigami has joined the prestigious group of Japanese starchitects.

Martha Thorne, director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Korean architects Yoo Hyun-joon and Park Jin-hee will hold separate sessions. 

Directors of renowned museums will also speak at the Herald Design Forum, including Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, and Bartomeu Mari, director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Both will speak on the second day of the forum.

Sudjic will address the groundbreaking changes that are rapidly unfolding in every aspect of our lives and the significance of design and architecture. Titled “How Fast Can We Go? The Future of Design,” the session will be an opportunity for the audience to discover relatable design and architecture insights. The venue of this year’s forum, DDP, was designed by the late Zaha Hadid, whose obituary by Sudjic appeared in the Guardian.

The MMCA director Mari will address some theoretical implications of design, particularly how design has become part of the thing in the gallery space and how it has become incorporated into discourses of art museums. Mari will explore the boundary breaking dynamics between art museums and design.

“The case is not very extended, not many art museums include design in their collections, exhibitions or public programs. Yet the evolution of what we call contemporary art has opened the door for innovative practices that include design, in one way or another, literally, metaphorically or symbolically. In parallel, we can also interrogate the contribution of design to the production of beauty, beyond functionality, destroying the monopoly that art used to have,” Mari said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Herald Design Forum 2018 will also will hold a conference dinner during which some of the speakers will deliver speeches. Speakers at the conference dinner include Princess Dana and Byun Sa-bum and Shin Myoung-sup, co-founders of brand experience marketing and design agency Plus X.



By Shim Woo-hyun (ws@heraldcorp.com)