We all know about the London Design Festival. But in these days of remote working and regional powerhouses, the days when everything in the design industry necessarily centred around the capital are long behind us. So what about the rest of the country?

That’s exactly what a group of students at Lancaster University led by Antonia Arbova thought. And they didn’t just moan into their subsidised beers: they did something about it.

In fact, they made so much noise about the need for an equivalent event up North, that countless design partners and brands have signed on to support the cause. And now for 2024, they’re launching the Northern Design Festival.

What is it?

The Northern Design Festival is a three-day festival hosted in Lancaster on 17-19 May 2024. For these three days, the historical city with a proud tradition of traditional crafts will become a hub for Northern design, showcasing what local talent has to offer.

Through panel discussions, presentations, workshops, mentorships and networking, the festival has partnered with the UK’s Design Council, G.F Smith, Foilco, Nomad, Two Stories, SUN (Studio Up North), Fraser House, EXP, Kellanova and others.

With an opening event on the Friday evening and two full days on the Saturday and Sunday, the festival will work as a creative launch pad for aspiring designers and creatives to explore the industry from different perspectives through experts in the creative community. The idea is to help connect the local design community and make it bigger, louder and better, to open up fresh possibilities in the region.

Why is it needed?

If you’re wondering why a Northern Design Festival is needed, you probably don’t live in Northern England. In southern cities creatives are spoilt for choice, but opportunities are much more limited up North, depriving creatives of the space to pursue their passions and connect with the industry outside of education.

For instance, in an online survey, the Northern Design Committee found that only 12.5% of those studying a creative major at University of Lancaster feel prepared to enter the creative industries after their undergraduate degrees.

Additionally, 82.6% believe the North does not have enough creative opportunities, and 78.3% feel there aren’t enough creative opportunities in Lancaster, making the festival a crucial step into the right direction.

Confirmed topics

Here’s a taste of what you can expect at the first Northern Design Festival this May:

North + South; the story of a love hate relationship: Shining a light on the creative opportunity gap between the north and south and the exploration of solutions.

How AI will not steal your job…: A topic to demystify the concept of destructive ai into a design tool that will promote and not hinder creativity.

Future Trends in Design: A discussion on crafting unique and cohesive designs, along with effective approaches to highlight upcoming trends.

The value of Design in the fight for climate change: How to efficiently apply sustainable design methods to combating climate change.

Design in the Aftermath of the Pandemic: Exploring the opportunities created by the pandemics introduction of hybrid co-design.

Your Journey: Share your journey into the industry to inspire and support our future designers.

Titled Joel Meyerowitz: Dialogues, the Huxley-Parlour exhibition opens on 18 January and runs through until March. Representing Joel’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, Dialogues is fittingly named as it coincides with another important display of the photographer’s work at London’s Tate Modern.

The theme of pairing runs even more profound, as the work presented in Dialogues is displayed in couples to reveal the unexpected parallels that emerge in Joel’s imagery. And by doing so, the photographer’s enduring fascination with colour and the experimental ways he uses it comes to the surface.

According to Joel, the pairs of photographs on display are “relational” images, each linked by light, colour and composition. Both exhibitions use pairing to investigate the colour in Joel’s pictures and his characteristic use of “complex compositional structure and unresolved, non-hierarchical imagery.”

As for the subjects in Joel’s work, the photographer tends to lean on distinctly American aesthetics, such as the stars and stripes, while blending them with meditative palettes. The photographs on display span from 1964 to 2011 and include lesser-known images from his extensive archive alongside his best-known pieces, such as his early street work and images from his seminal series, Cape Light.

“Meyerowitz is widely acknowledged to be one of the first photographers – amongst others such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore – to bring colour photography from the periphery to the centre of fine art photography,” says Huxley-Parlour.

In a modern world where everything can be recorded and reviewed with a couple of smartphone screen taps, Joel’s revolutionary approach to colour can almost be easy to underestimate. “Historically, where black and white photography was understood to be a serious medium, colour was widely considered to be technically inferior and aesthetically limiting – occupying the realm of advertising campaigns, television, and personal holiday photographs,” adds the gallery.

“In defiance of this, Meyerowitz’s work demonstrated how the medium allowed nuanced contemplation of form, composition, and mood.”

Meanwhile, at the ongoing display at Tate Modern, London, visitors will see Joel’s progression from colour to black and white in the 1960s, when he first began to embrace the limitations and aesthetics introduced by colour film. Featured works include A Question of Color, in which Joel carried around two cameras and shot nearly the same scene both in colour and black and white.

Winner of the sharing the planet category: Saving Orangutans 01, by Alain Schroeder

‘Sibolangit, SOCP quarantine centre, North Sumatra, Indonesia. The whole SOCP team works together to prepare Brenda, an estimated three-month-old female orangutan (she has no teeth yet), for surgery. A sedative is administered, the arm is shaved, her temperature is taken, while others hold her head or her hand out of compassion for the baby … Brenda was confiscated from a villager in Blang Pidie on the west coast of Aceh who was keeping her as a pet’

Photograph: Alain Schroeder

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