Dezeen announces Virtual Design Festival, the world’s first online design festival, taking place from Wednesday 15 April onwards.

With much of the world in lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, the global architecture and design community is, along with many other sectors, facing unprecedented challenges.

Virtual Design Festival (www.virtualdesignfestival.com) is a platform that will bring the architecture and design world together to celebrate the culture and commerce of our industry, and explore how it can adapt and respond to extraordinary circumstances.

We will host a rolling programme of online talks, lectures, movies, product launches and more. It will complement and support fairs and festivals around the world that have had to be postponed or cancelled and it will provide a platform for design businesses, so they can, in turn, support their supply chains.

We are inviting individuals, companies and organisations to get in touch to explore how we can help each other. We would like to team up with other architecture and design publications as well.

While we cannot pretend that these are normal times, we can at least explore alternative ways of sharing design, helping others, coming together as a global community and doing business.

How Virtual Design Festival will work

From 15 April onwards, we will host a rolling programme of online talks, lectures, movies, product launches and more. Some of these activities will replace those that we would have hosted at fairs and festivals around the world, but we also want to explore new and innovative formats, specially tailored for the digital sphere and for our locked-down world.

We are particularly interested in hearing from technology companies and developers who could help us develop innovative formats to help connect the global architecture and design community and help them work more effectively in the current situation.