The Ruhrtriennale is a festival of the arts in the Ruhr metropolitan area. It showcases artistic performances from different areas, such as music, acting, dance, and installation. For six weeks at various venues, culture and art are linked with the Ruhr’s industrial architecture. The various events dissolve the boundaries between art forms and are all intended to creatively shape the “in-between time” – a period of social and cultural upheaval.

The London Design Festival’s aim is to make the city’s lively world of design accessible. The numerous events include exhibitions, trade fairs, workshops, public tours of studios and ateliers, and much more. Creative people from the areas of graphic design, industrial design, architecture, and textile design, as well as representatives of new media and craft, make the design festival a multidisciplinary event. A special highlight of the festival is the exhibition at the London Design Biennale at Somerset House, where designers from around the world will display interactive installations that illustrate the influence that design has on emotions. It will demonstrate how design pleases, educates, and surprises its viewers and how it challenges us.

This will be the fourth year that the “Art Out Loud” festival takes place at Chatsworth House, bringing together speakers from the worlds of design, architecture, and art. Included amongst the contributors are the artist Lubaina Himid, who in 2017 was the first black female artist to win the Turner Prize, and the photographer David Dawson, long-time assistant and friend of the British painter, Lucian Freud. Tickets for individual events can be purchased on the event’s website, as can day tickets that allow visitors to attend three different lectures on Friday and Sunday and four lectures on Saturday.

The entire city is the setting for Berlin Design Week, which is aimed at everyone from professional designers and architects, start-ups and the technology scene to institutions and companies, as well as consumers and the general public interested in design. Exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and many other events focus primarily on innovations, new approaches, and experimental discussions. Among other things, the intention of the Open Studio Night on 27 September 2018, at which local design studios will provide an insight into their work, is to sharpen the profile of this capital city as a creative hub. The festival State of Design Berlin offers both established and up-and-coming designers a platform to present themselves and their products, while an extensive supporting programme discusses the future of design.

Since 1999, every three years, photography has been given a special focus in Hamburg, with viewers having the opportunity to see the world from different perspectives. This year’s event looks at the meaning of the moment you press the button in the process of change. Photographs have the potential to capture a moment, pause time, and initiate change in the observer. The slogan of this year’s seventh edition of the photography festival is “Breaking Point. Searching for Change”. It reflects current ecological, social, political, and economic movements and the current “experience of reality” in times of upheaval. The Triennial of Photography offers a wide range of works from the photographic genre, which can be viewed in various museums, exhibition halls, and galleries and at different art venues across Hamburg.

The Brighton Digital Festival explores developments and innovations in digital culture with a special focus on Brighton’s innovative digital economy and its vibrant art scene. At the heart of the festival is The Messy Edge conference, which addresses the impact of technology on social, cultural, and political issues. Numerous exhibitions, performances, and hackathons are held across the city, and initiated not only by the organisers themselves, but also by artists, interested people, and Brighton residents.

Under the banner “To Infinity and Beyond” the Breda photography festival explores the forms of change and evolution that lead to continuous advances in technology and science. Over 55 national and international photographers have taken the opportunity to visually capture the dangers and dilemmas of technological progress and the challenges that we already experience in the present as well as those that we are likely to face in the future. New inventions inevitably have two sides to them: What if robots don’t merely simplify our lives, but instead create mass unemployment and financial and social inequality? What happens when machines and knowledge about genetic engineering fall into the wrong hands? If you can change the genes of a mosquito to make the malaria virus disappear, can you also manipulate them to carry a new virus? The Anthropogenic age, where man is the decisive factor in environmental change is simultaneously characterised by infinite possibility and great danger to the environment, humanity, and life itself.

Since its foundation in 2012, the Istanbul Design Biennial has pursued the aim of bringing the creative industries and the academic world together to initiate dialogues, new ideas, solutions, and collaborations. For 2018, the theme of the fourth edition curated by Jan Boelen, Nadine Botha, and Vera Sacchetti is “A School of Schools”. Over a period of six weeks, one “school” each will be located at six locations in the city, and these will view and communicate design in different ways. These include, for example, the Currents School, dealing with the dissemination, hierarchy, and networking of information and topics; the Earth School, focusing on aspects such as nature, the relationship of mankind with its home planet and evolution; and the Unmaking School, looking at creativity, innovation, and future scenarios.

The Retune Festival, which took place for the first time in 2012, brings together more than 250 creative people to discuss the interfaces between design, art, and technology. They will show how they combine creativity with technology in theory and practice through presentations, workshops, and exhibitions. Various art and design studios throughout Berlin will be open to visitors on 28 September 2018.

The Vienna Design Week aims to inspire the broad public with the design scene in this city, while maintaining a high standard of content and depth. Here, design is not understood as a purely aesthetic medium, but as an important part of everyday life. Formats used in previous years will once again be part of the programme in 2018: the Passionswege, in which Austrian designers and Viennese production companies can work together and experiment free of commercial guidelines; a district of the city highlighted as a focus – this year it is Neubau, Vienna’s seventh district; or Debüt, a platform for two selected universities and their design students. As in 2011, Poland has been selected as the guest country. The “The ABCs of Polish Design” exhibition is dedicated to the past 100 years of design history of this country, amongst other things.