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Austin Design Week

Austin Design Week was an annual festival that happened every November from 2016-2021 to celebrate Austin's creative community. While it has been discontinued, we encourage you to check out this website to learn more about the incredible effort of this community.

On the Blog

A farewell to Austin Design Week

Dear ADW community,

Last year, we announced that we were putting Austin Design Week on hold as we sought out an institution that could take on this budding nonprofit to make sure it could sustain and grow long into the future.

We spent the past year having in-depth conversations with universities, non-profit funders, the City of Austin, and other private and community organizations. Our priority was to find a home for ADW that would keep the festival’s values of embracing all design disciplines, inclusivity & accessibility, and being in service of the larger creative community. While there are a lot of amazing organizations out there doing important work to support creatives in Austin, we ultimately weren’t able to find the right fit.

We’re writing with the difficult news to let you know that we’re discontinuing Austin Design Week.

It’s with a heavy heart that we share this news, but also a sense of great pride in what you–the community–built over the six years with Austin Design Week.

Important ADW 2022 Update

To our ADW community,

We want to thank all of you for your incredible support and excitement in building, participating in, shaping, and growing Austin Design Week. The last six years have been transformative for us, for the city, for the many disciplines of design, and for everyone who built relationships in this community along the way. In case you’re missing the magic of ADW already, here’s the recap from last year’s festival.

It’s about that time of year when we’d typically announce the dates and theme for the 2022 event. We haven't done that yet this year because we're taking this year off.

We’re working behind the scenes to secure a new organizational home for ADW so that it can grow bigger and better and continue to serve our growing community for many years to come. As part of this change, we're bringing in new leadership and need to take this year off to give them time to get onboarded and plan for ADW's future.

We’re not quite ready to announce any specifics just yet, but we will share more details as soon as we can. As founders and organizers who are deeply invested in this event and community, our first priority is to ensure that we stay true to the original mission of ADW and the festival’s core values of embracing all design disciplines, inclusivity, accessibility, and service to the larger creative community.

Why Austin Designers Deserve Their Own Design Week

Danielle Barnes, on behalf of the Austin Design Week founding team

When I first moved to Austin and asked a UX designer about the design community, I was surprised by his response: “There isn't really a community.” There are a lot of talented designers, and some great organizations, but not one community.

Design can be found in our living rooms, at the office, in our cities, and in our pockets; Innovation in design has radically changed the world we know. With this has come a shift in what society celebrates and what we value. Great design is redefining how we interact with our world.

There is much to gain when designers work hand-in-hand with other designers. Major cities like New York and Stockholm first popularized the design week concept, showing what can be accomplished when designers come together to explore the process, creation and practice of design. Meanwhile SXSW brings talent from all over the world to Austin, but who is featuring the amazing work that's happening here in our city?

There are so many talented design leaders, organizations and initiatives happening in Austin. The Design Institute of Health opened up alongside the new Medical School to reinvent the way we think about health care; the UT Center for Integrated Design is the first integrated design program at a major public university in the U.S.; IBM design re-created a design studio environment within a global enterprise; Argo Design is exploring the future of transportation; Michael Hsu Office of Architecture is reshaping Austin one building at a time.