Three design events in Europe, Arctic Design Week, Munich Creative Business Week in Germany, and Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne in France are collaborating to pilot Global Design Talks, dialogues across disciplines on complex, systemic and often global challenges.

Climate change mitigation can hardly happen without our connection to nature. The first GDT at Arctic Design Week will focus on Reconnecting with Nature, a theme identified of high importance by individuals and bodies participating in the extensive European wide co-design phase of the New European Bauhaus initiative, and a theme extremely relevant in the vulnerable Arctic where impacts of climate change are severe.

You are warmly welcome to take part in the dialogue with invited experts Simón Ballen, a young environmentally and socially conscious designer residing in Columbia and The Netherlands, Fredrika Klarén, Sustainability Director of Polestar, an electric car company in Sweden with an ambitious sustainability programme, Lisa Lang, Director for EU & Policy Affairs for EIT Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) and a member of Forbes 50 Women in Tech list, and Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen, Chairperson of the Danish Unesco National Commission, former Rector of Design School Kolding and former Minister of Culture in Denmark.

Global Design Talks is initiated by Arctic Design Week in the Finnish Lapland. ’Collaboration is power, and we at Arctic Design Week are proud and happy to partner up with these two great European design events’, says the creator of the GDT concept and the Past President of Bureau of European Design Associations BEDA Päivi Tahkokallio.

’Design is not a stand-alone. We need a dialogue across disciplines to find solutions for the pressing challenges like climate change affecting all of us. The most important role of design is to serve and to work with other industries to find solutions together.’

The dialogues will continue at Munich Creative Business Week on 17—18 May and at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne on 10 June 2022.

You can get a ticket to the first GDT on 25 March from here