Dutch Design Week 2020 was an online success

Dutch Design Week (DDW) looks back on a successful virtual edition with a reach of several hundreds of thousands, mainly professionals. The organisation is proud of what has been achieved together with the design community in a short period of time, the diversity of interesting design content that has resulted from this and the relevant connections that have been made over the past nine days. The business community, professionals, governments, media, and designers managed to find one another during the week to exchange ideas. At the same time, the live part remains indispensable. DDW sees its future as a hybrid festival with online and offline components.

Thanks to over 1,500 (inter)national designers, DDW became the online centre of the creative industry last week. With 750 3D Viewing Rooms, virtual tours, matchmaking sessions, DDW TV, livestreams by partners and designers, publicity on national television and radio, and a.o. a virtual visit from the minister of Education, Culture, and Science, Ingrid van Engelshoven, the organisation considers the virtual festival a success. The festival reached hundreds of thousands of people via several outlets. In addition to the many website visitors and DDW TV viewers from all over the world, there was also extensive attention for the programme in (inter)national media. “The combination of virtual and live, that will be the future of DDW. Ultimately, meeting one another in real life remains an indispensable experience,” says Martijn Paulen, director of Dutch Design Foundation.

Two weeks before the start of the festival, the organisation was told they could not continue with the live component of the festival based on the advice of the Safety Region. It decided to concentrate on creating a fully virtual DDW in the remaining weeks. This required enormous flexibility from everyone involved; participants, partners, and the organisation itself. Paulen: “One of the most special things we have seen this week is the resilience of the design community. They managed to create a fantastic online programme in a short time and utilized all virtual possibilities to the fullest.”

Partly for this reason, the organisation has decided to make the 750 3D Viewing Rooms available online for ninety days instead of just nine. All video content and DDW TV programmes would already remain available on the platform. “So much valuable content has been created. We consider it an important task to ensure that this content remains accessible throughout the year and is used in different ways. We want to continue to work with our partners and the community towards new valuable connections and stories,” says Paulen.

DDW Virtual in numbers:

• Designers: 1500
• Events: 600
• Livestreams by designers: 400
• Programmes DDW TV: 125
• Number of minutes DDW TV: 3500
• Viewers DDW TV: 50.000