The most amazing thing about the first-ever Seattle Design Festival is that it’s the first-ever Seattle Design Festival. How could something so obvious as a festival devoted to local, regional, and international design have never happened here before?
The 10-day festival is programmed and sponsored by organizations and firms including AIA Seattle, SIFF, Mithun, ARCADE, Industrial Designers Society of America NW, Seattle Architecture Foundation, and Bassetti Architects. One of the many panels concerns Brightwater, “a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment system designed to handle the projected growth in King and Snohomish Counties.” Design, bacteria, and urban infrastructure—what more could you ask for?
Another promising panel, Beyond Boundaries, will be moderated by John Boylan and engage Lead Pencil Studio (Stranger Genius Award winners), Vall-Nogues Studio, and Atherton|Keener in a conversation about the intersections of art and architecture. Also: Hidden Places and Stories, a tour of Seattle’s downtown obscure parks and gardens; an expo on container architecture; and documentaries screened in SIFF’s new home at the Seattle Center (the building was designed by Owen Richards Architects).
This is a good start to a thing we should have begun long ago. 
(Hint: Our future holds very little in the way of growth. Don’t get too worked up about the special majik of rain gardens and solar-powered espresso stands. Perhaps we should worry more about how to manage contraction.)
Dear Charles,
The following is meant to be kind of a question: A certain read of what design is is anathema to what is serious art in the twentieth century. There is a serious social/economic binary at work here. Let’s be honest, making art that embraises classical esthetics and looks good hanging on the walls of dentists and attorneys is not the kind of important art that rebelled against such traditions in the twentieth century. Architects, flower arrangers and interior and industrial designers tend to embrace the antithesis of what has become the rage of our time found in art. Architecture builds functional combinations of essentially boxes with prettiness that misses the point of much of contemporary art. Architecture is stuck in modernism and failed at finding a real postmodern solution. Why then is it so cool that we have a festival dedicated to design? Architecture and garden and interior designers are part of the upper bourgeois, conspicuous consumption and plutocratic elite. So why, dear Charles, are you so joyed at such a celebration? Charles, isn’t design, these days, kind of alienated from art? Just asking, Charles. Shouldn’t there be more revolution contained in this festival? Yeah, I know there’s Lead Pencil Studio but my God. Industrial design? Ah yes the barons of industry are really something aren’t they? Charles, are you celebrating the gentrification of Seattle and the some elevation of upper-class taste here?
Gut it like minnow with a Bowie knife and slap some crap up “they will come” and pay you well for it at least until the bubble pops.
Oh, wait, I get it, it’s a shipping container disguised as a woodsy weekend get-away. How clever and edgy. That’ll be $75,000 in design fees, thank you very much.
Really: who’s buying this shit?