Spotlight: DC Design Week 2017.

AIGA DC is gearing up for another annual Design Week! If you aren’t familiar with AIGA and its DC chapter, we recommend reading up! Workhorse partner Tj Cichecki has long been active in the AIGA community and now serves as a member of the DC chapter board. So what is Design Week? Well, for starters, it’s an opportunity to champion DC’s vibrant design community through citywide activations and programming. It’s also an opportunity to shine a light on DC as a major player in the larger design community. From their perspective, the DC community is uniquely at the forefront of change-making design, and Design Week is about highlighting those opportunities and how we can keep the conversation going. We couldn’t be more on board.

DC Design Week kicks off at the end of October with a pretty killer lineup of events. Here’s our go-to guide— registration kicks off at 9am tomorrow (10/4) so you should pick up your tickets before they sell out!

• *Design + Activism* with Emory Douglas. Emory Douglas is the former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, and the creator of their iconic protest posters in the 1970s. At a time when the current administration is at such odds with news outlets both large and small, we’re really looking forward to hearing Mr. Douglas share his perspective on the intersection of design and social discourse. Meet us there.
• *How to Fight Fascism* with Mike Monteiro. Co-founder and design director of Mule Design, Monteiro has become a critical voice on the role design plays in crafting our present and our future. This talk should be one for the books— in his words, “All design is political, because all politics are designed. The world is a mess because a certain set of people designed it to be a mess. Now we need a different set of people to design our way out of it.“ Mike, we’re ready.
• *un-hackathon II* with Color Coded & IBM. Ever been to a hackathon? Think of these day-long collaborative computer programming sprints as innovation at warp-speed. Color Coded DC is a group that seeks to create digital safe spaces via tech and empowerment, and they’ll be hosting a hackathon of their very own with IBM and iStrategy Labs. This one will feature Design Thinking workshops, program tutorials, and even yoga! All in the name of empowering women founders and creatives. Yep, pretty sure this is going to be a stellar event.

Also on the docket— creative lunches, a week-long pop up shop, and some pretty sweet parties. Register online here, and follow along @dcdesignweek to stay up on the details. And if you see us, say hey!