The organizers of Design Portland, the group behind the annual Design Week event, announced an end to the event and organization.
For eight years the group organized the festival that included hundreds of smaller events over the course of a week at locations throughout Portland. In 2020 the event was slated to kick off April 18, however, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic the group moved the event to August and then ultimately hosted a virtual event.
The pandemic hit the group hard as events and community gathering are core to its purpose. Organizers tried different ways to engage and support the community but ultimately its core principals decided it was time to end it, said co-founder Tsilli Pines.
“It’s not just the pandemic. Over the past couple years there was a reckoning with culturally who is being centered in communities like this,” said Pines. “We had been doing work to diversify who was setting the agenda of the programming. We continued doing that work through everything that was happening last June (amid racial justice protests in Portland and across the country). Taken all together and taken with the realities of running a nonprofit we did a lot of thinking and soul searching.”
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The time, she said, seemed right to hand over the space to a new generation. In addition to Pines the event was co-founded by Eric Hillerns. The two other core members were Kate Bingaman Burt and Rachel Coddington.
“There is a time and a season for certain groups of people to catalyze,” she said. “We felt like we had done our thing and it was time for someone else to envision what that thing would be now. I’m excited to see what might be.”
The group is leaving its website up as an archive of past events. Over the years, it has held more than 1,500 festival events, seen more than 400 organizers and more than 500 volunteers and had more than 8,000 attendees. The above gallery illustrates past Design Week events.
The event was collaborative and spanned all aspects of design and didn’t focus on one discipline. Pines said there are lots of organizations doing related work and groups using design to tackle big challenges. She expects the city's creative energy will coalesce and another event or group will emerge.
Portland, she said, is still fertile ground for this kind of work despite the challenges the city is facing. She pointed to the Albina Vision project as an example of using design and design thinking to take on challenges.
“Design operates well under challenges and constraints. That is the space of creativity in many design practices,” she said. “It’s a space of enormous opportunity and there are lots of people operating here who care.”
