Alldesign Creative Industries and Emerging Technologies Fair & International Design Conference 2015 was held between February 19th-21st in Lütfi Kırdar Convention and Exhibition Center. Starting off in 2011 with the motto of “seeing through the mind’s eye” and organized for the fourth time in 2015, Alldesign brought together widely-acclaimed local and international design experts. This year, the annual event for creative industries expanded its scope to include emerging technologies and entrepreneurship.
On the first day of the conference, February 19th, GEDS founder Gülay Özkan also delivered a speech about design’s new role in creating human-centric innovation with the title “Design Giving a Heart to Technology.” She talked about new disciplines of design such as business design, strategy design, and service design. She exemplified how a design perspective can leverage organizations based on GEDS’ works. Touching upon both technology and design, Özkan concluded by mentioning her upcoming design book as well as the value of design for the economy.
The conference featured important figures from the international design world such as Todd Thomas, Daniel Libeskind, Boris Micka, Hunter Tura, Mathias Seiler, and Valerio Castelli. There were also notable designers and architects from Turkey including Derin Sarıyer, Koray Malhan, Can Yalman, and Murat Tabanlıoğlu. Among these speakers, Todd Thomas, Hunter Tura, Koray Malhan, and Derin Sarıyer presented about their own perspectives and processes of design, while Can Yalman talked about how he applied design thinking into his practice of industrial design. The conference also included a number of non-designer speakers like Ömer Hızıroğlu, who talked about how design can be protected under intellectual property laws, and Fırat Kasapoğlu, who talked about design’s role in economic and social transformation in today’s Turkey. Other notable speakers were Alpay Er, Nick Bostrom, Cem Topçuoğlu, Natasha Vita-More, Cem Soysal along with several other who delivered remarkable speeches throughout the conference.
Within the past years since 2011, 107 leading names have participated in the event, 5700 people have attended conferences, and about 15000 people have visited the fair. Alldesign, conceived as an event focused on making design “functional, usable and penetrated to every area of life,” has aimed at broadening the horizon of the different industries and being a big source of inspiration for everyone. The participants of this year’s Alldesign, over three days, discovered how design and emerging technologies could affect individuals and communities, change behaviors, and shape the human future.
