RDW2023: A creative rendez-vous with the city of Bucharest

The Romanian Design Week (RDW2023) exhibition, happening May 12-28, will showcase a total of 162 architecture, interior design, graphic design, illustration, product design, and fashion design projects. The main event will take place at Amzei Market, accompanied by more than 100 satellite events all over the city. BR tracked down Andrei Bortun, the CEO of The Institute, to get a look behind the scenes.

By Oana Vasiliu

Romanian Design Week has now reached its 11th edition. How has the event changed over the years?

In the beginning, for us and for our partners, the community, and the public, the main focus was on the RDW Exhibition. But starting this year, there will be a significant increase in the number of formats being featured in the festival, each of them bringing a diversification of this project’s objectives, audiences, and sponsorships over the course of the next 10 years. (…) This year we also started creating an archive of best practices, with projects that deserve recognition even if they don’t make it into the exhibition. They are displayed on the Romanian Design Week website and will be included in post-event communications. Through this approach, we aim to encourage studios with small budgets, newcomers, and young designers and promote them even outside the exhibition.

What has changed in terms of the project’s objectives over the years? Is the initial stated mission still valid today?

In the first four years, we mainly focused on bringing different professional guilds with common DNA and objectives to a single stage—both literally and figuratively: product design, fashion design, graphic design, interior design, architecture, and urban planning. The initial goal was to bring an accurate, but also comprehensive definition of what design meant, both as a process and as a result.

In the following three years, we set out to increase the audience of the festival, reaching over 30,000 visitors in 2019. Whereas in these first 7 years, we organised the central exhibition in little-known buildings around the city (Stirbei Palace, Amzei Market, Cobalcescu Garages, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Telephone Palace, etc.), in the last 3, with the “help” of the pandemic, we focused on creating the cultural-creative map of the city, and with the help of Romanian Design Week, we leveraged the infrastructure offered by Combinatul Fondului Plastic, through a project called COMBINAT.

After these three years, COMBINAT has been fully discovered and it has become one of the favourite locations of creative project leaders and their audiences. (…) In short, our objectives are largely the same but more diversified, and the Romanian Design Week mission is actually part of The Institute Organisation's mission.

“Connections” is the theme of this year’s RDW. Who is this concept aimed at? What does it take to be “connected” in this industry?

It is an invitation for anyone who wants a country and society that knows how to strategically use the creative talent of its citizens and the strength of its civil society. We need a country where dialogue and collaboration can become both a priority and an instinctual response. For several years now, your role has represented an active connection between different stakeholders: designers, companies, institutions. What does the design community need to do to become connected in a functional and continuous manner? What form should this dialogue take, apart from the industry events that happen once a year?

There needs to be a paradigm shift, one that must be accepted not only by the design community but also by businesses or government agencies: cultural and creative scenes and industries should not just be helped; they should become useful. Whether we are talking about economic objectives, country or city branding, talent retention and attraction or increasing the quality of life, these people, organisations, guilds, scenes or industries can all contribute immensely to achieving these objectives (if they exist or appear) through medium- and long-term strategies. (…)

In the end, we are still talking about DESIGN, about projects that should be properly formulated, followed, and constantly improved to generate a better quality of life. It’s not about designers and creatives as individuals, but about the way they can help on these fronts.

What event are you the most excited about at RDW2023?

The closing party: because it will bring together all the people who have been involved, one way or another, in making this Romanian Design Week edition come to life.