Interdesign workshops in Eastern Europe

ICSID, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design—now the World Design Organization—has been promoting industrial design around the world since 1957. In 1971, the organization launched a new programme of international seminars aimed at responding to real-world challenges while demonstrating how design could contribute to solving problems, improving the environment, and assisting industries and state bodies with economic development ideas. Another aim was to explore opportunities for international collaboration between designers on projects of social value.
Bringing together mid-career designers across political and economic boundaries, the workshops provided a distinctive forum for the East–West exchange of knowledge and expertise, thereby facilitating collaboration across cultural and national boundaries. The participants brought along a wide range of previous experiences in different design fields, so they needed an innovative workshop format encouraging an interactive exchange of ideas instead of a more passive academic format. An essential focus of the two-week workshops was working on site: after identifying the problems to be solved, potential solutions were developed in dialogue with participants and local residents.
Over the decades, topics ranged from the development of local industry to the design of services and systems for urban transport, tourism, and healthcare, with a particular focus on people with limited mobility, such as the elderly, people with disabilities, and children. While the first workshop was held in Minsk (USSR, now Belarus), later editions were held across Eastern Europe. For example, the Bauhaus in Dessau hosted an Interdesign workshop on the topic of playgrounds in August 1979, jointly organized by the Office for Industrial Design in East Berlin and the Finnish designers’ association ORNAMO as part of a scientific and technical exchange programme between the governments of East Germany and Finland. Eastern Europe saw further Interdesign workshops, in Hungary (1979, 1981, 1988), again in East Germany (1990), and also in Yugoslavia (1990). A workshop had been planned for 1977 in Bulgaria, but did not come to pass: its focus was to have been on the problems of redeveloping a historic city district, here using the example of Plovdiv, looking at signage and advertising, urban furniture, and waste collection. The latest workshop to date was in 2014, held in Mumbai.