Innovation Station: Belgrade Design Week 2013

It may have something to do with Serbia’s recent past and the realisation that you only live once – carpe diem, and all that – or it could just be the native love of making new friends and (as anyone who has been to Belgrade will testify to) having a good time, but at the region’s leading design event, Belgrade Design Week, it’s ultimately about people, rather than things. Living, breathing, creative, inspiring (and often partying) people.

For all its surrounding events – of which there are many, such as BDW DesignPark, a carefully curated exhibition presenting the work of designers from Serbia, Greece, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and the USA – Belgrade Design Week’s main attraction remains its big-top, three-day conference, which year-on-year manages to draw some of the highest-profile names from the global creative arena to the Danube city.

The secret? BDW’s founder, the entrepreneurial one-man dynamo and advertising bigwig Jovan Jelovac, whose address book, if we still lived in pre-digital times, would resemble a four-set telephone directory. For this year’s edition of BDW, Jelovac and his talented staffers – chief among them his wife, Vesna Jelovac, who, a force of nature in herself, heads up the team as CEO – brought together the likes of acclaimed French designer Christophe Pillet and award-winning ad agency TBWA’s art director Paul Belford, as well as Fiat design chief Virgilio Fernandez.

While 2013 saw the event’s eighth annual outing, it’s anything but tired or predictable. With ‘Innovation²’ as the title of the conference, new ideas and ways of thinking were presented by an impressive line-up of speakers, delivered to an internationally drawn congregation of professionals, journalists and students, while there was ample opportunity for everyone to share knowledge and opinions at the many dinners, parties and other gatherings across the city.

Among those taking to the stage at BDW’s main venue – in itself a rare architectural treat; BDW pulled off a coup in having the Museum of Contemporary Art (Usce), designed by Ivan Antic and Ivanka Raspopovic and completed in 1965, open its doors temporarily to host the event, having been closed to the public for the past six years for restoration work – were the renowned Dutch technological innovator Daan Roosegaarde and innovative Polish designer Oskar Zieta. Roosegaarde shared his vision of the future of transportation, while Polish designer Oskar Zieta discussed his innovative inflatable-sheet-metal technology, which is forming new typologies in design. (See the link at the end of this article for the technology applied to the Architonic Concept Space III.)

Amid the international roster of speakers at BDW was a local voice – Belgrade’s city architect, Dejan Vasovic, who presented the Serbian capital’s plans for a number of new architectural landmarks, not least Zaha Hadid Architects’ Beko Masterplan, which will involve almost 100,000 square metres of urban regeneration, turning the site of a former textile factory in a new cultural destination, with various buildings and public spaces. The first Hadid undertaking in the region, the ambitious Beko project will certainly help to boost Belgrade’s credentials as a design destination.

But it was Troika – the London-based interdisciplinary studio, whose thinking and practice has been applied with striking results to the interface between architecture, installation and sculpture, their projects appearing in, among other places, the UK pavilion at the 2010 World Expo Shanghai – who succeeded in captivating the Belgrade audience the most. They rightfully picked up the BDW 2013 Grand Prix, a plaudit awarded by popular vote of the conference delegates.

Belgrade might literally mean ‘white city’ but BDW, with its continuous delivery of high-calibre, inspirational speakers, combined with its top-notch hospitality and networking, never fails to paint the town red.

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Videos of some of the big-name speakers from BDW 2103:

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