Design Diplomacy: What Happens When Two Designers Walk into an Embassy
Every March, designers from various countries meet in the northernmost capital in the world (Reykjavik, Iceland) for DesignMarch, a multi-day festival that celebrates architecture, fashion, furniture, and graphic design and hosts over 100 events. The festival, which is organized by the Iceland Design Centre, has mingled local and international designers for ten years now, allowing them to explore green homes, examine the quality of different textiles, collaborate on small projects, and take part in passionate discussions on all things design. For the past two years, DesignMarch has also listed “Design Diplomacy” in its program.
“Design Diplomacy seemed to fit well with our festival’s vibe,” says Anna Koziol, a Project Manager at DesignMarch. “There’s no VIP invitations and red carpets.” The organizers of Design Diplomacy, and of the festival as whole, endeavor to bring people into spaces that are not typically open to the public, and the residence of an ambassador is definitely a place that fits into that category.
Every participant of Design Diplomacy (the ambassador, the two designers, and the public) receives a kind of qualitative benefit. The designers get to share their experiences, habits, business advice, and ways of thinking. Sometimes, two designers might even informally plan to work with each other during the event. At a minimum, the foreign designers get to engage with the local ones, who serve as ambassadors to various design disciplines in Iceland. The audience gets to watch the dialogue inside a space that is publicly inaccessible — something that brings a certain novelty and candor to the conversation in and of itself.
If everybody else learns from the experience of Design Diplomacy, then what’s in it for the ambassador whose residence is the scene of the talks? “Design Diplomacy is a soft-diplomacy force of a kind,” Koziol explains. “Each Ambassador/Embassy gets a chance to shed some light on their country’s culture to both the local scene and foreign guests of the festival. Embassies get a chance to reinforce their importance in cultural exchange, as opposed the perception of being very formal visa-issuing institutions, [an idea] that seems to be very prevalent among the general public.”
Diplomacy has a way of bringing realities into focus and turning differences into advantages that everyone can learn from.