Design Festa - afterwards

This is gonna be a long one…

Saturday I went to Design Festa at 10am to volunteer. I had to leave my house at 8am to get there on time. After Design Festa finished on Saturday at 7pm, I left to go to Shibuya to meet up with some friends. From there, we went to a club because one of our friends was performing…

We left the club in time to catch the first train, which was about 4am. I got home at 6am, showered, and finally went to sleep. I woke up at 8am and headed out again to Tokyo Big Site to volunteer at Design Festa. Went to sleep at like 12, and got up at 8 to go to work the next day.

That was nuts… but I’m alive. Maybe sleep isn’t necessary afterall…

Amazingly enough though. I am up on Sunday night at midnight preparing parts of this entry… Design Festa (new link) was very exciting. Even though I was physically extremely tired, mentally I was wide awake throughout the entire event. Never have I see -so many- interesting individuals in one place in my entire life.

I was able to talk to a lot of people, and see a lot of crazy creations that the participants had on display.

This guy works as a woodsmith (�؍ފ֌W�j, and has been to DesignFesta a number of times. He has his ‘korokoro’ series, which consists of different devices such as this, that go round and round. This was great, you climb in, and he grabs your feet and spins you around “giant swing” style. The outside rotates around you, so you don’t actually go upside down.

There were lots of clothes designers at the event as well. There was a booth called Bag Art. This backpack is made of green colored -leather-. It is actually functional as well. One of the most amazing creations I have ever seen. There is only one though, and it’s not for sale. The other bag has lots of fish heads attached ‘iwashi’. It is just gross. You see it in the background of the green bag picture as well.

Doesn’t that green bag kinda remind you of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? No? Just me? Hrm…

There was also an illustrator who does cute niku-man pics. Another guy who calls himself Mr. Mint came all the way from Thailand just for this event. Here is another pretty cool Illustrator. There was so much stuff, and so many name cards were passed out… it’s nuts. Really nuts.

At the end some dudes trashed a car artistically. The sound was impressive too.

Take time to check out Design Festa’s site. They have better pictures than I do up for sure. If you’re in Tokyo, stop by their building in Harajuku. Good stuff, good people, good fun!

I first heard about DesignFesta on greggman’s site btw.

-Harvey