An outdoors cultural activity awoke the Athens centre. It aimed at raising awareness on what citizens can do about ecological issues.
By using new technologies, visual stimulation and design, Green Design Festival turned the city into a live interactive park of ideas on how to turn our neighbourhoods greener and more citizen friendly. The festival was an initiative of NGO Branlab under the egis of Athens Municipality. More than 70 architects, industrial, graphic and fashion designers as well as street artists were invited to create work around the theme of environment and create an experience with eco messages through eco media.
“Green Design Festival was born out of the necessity to turn Athens into a live ideas place, through a cultural activity using applied arts like architecture, photography, fashion, industrial design, new technologies, graphic design and graffiti,” says Antonia Akaraki, Vice President of Brainlab. “All the people of Brainlab feel very lucky we were able to express our worries and shape our opinions through our own language, aiming at raising awareness for the environment. It’s not easy to express all this, to find a specific shape in a human scale which everybody understands. Even more so at present, when the participation of the youth was so great.” This festival motive’s was “The hope for a greener, friendlier, more vivid tomorrow for us and our children”, says Mrs Skaraki. “We dedicate this festival to them – to all the children.”
INTERACTIVE GREEN TOYS
The event was structured around ‘ecomuse-um of green design’, an ecological contemporary open playground at Syndagma Square. The anti-museum welcomed the main body of festival in a light alternative structure where people could visit the photography exhibition, green fashion, industrial design, video and mixed media, the green library of Green Design as well as a small open amphitheatre made solely out of wooden palettes which hosted concerts and lectures.
In different central spots of the city two more big green street art activities and interactive graphic design took place. With the participation of Athinian street artists and supervision of b. the city centre became a rainbow forest of big graffiti in the form of giant trees. At the same time, established graphic designers create big green maps of Athens easily accessible by everyone through bluetooth. These maps could be shared and invite everyone to a fun, interactive green game.
Green Design Festival introduced a symbolic vertical garden; the first in the city. Vertical gardens are a global popular trend in landscape design and considered one of the most appropriate and stylish green solutions for cities.
During the festival, little guerilla motion design videos were shared through social media, inviting people to become ‘guerilla gardeners’ of our cities by creating green spots where there is none.
