Toronto Design Offsite Festival Prototype Exhibition Call for Submissions
Register/Submit Deadline: Friday, Sep 21, 201811:59 PMEDT
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Going into its fourth year, Work/Life (formerly Compact Living) is an annual exhibition organized by the Toronto Design Offsite Festival in partnership with Umbra. A dozen new prototypes by Canadian designers are shown each year at the Umbra Store during the Toronto Design Offsite Festival. Previously run by invitation only, this year Work/Life is structured as an open call for any Canadian designer (living here or abroad) to submit.
About the exhibition
Showcasing the work of Canadian designers, Work/Life is an exhibition that explores fresh and original housewares and working products for contemporary life.
Work/Life will run during the annual city-wide Toronto Design Offsite Festival, January 18-27, 2019. All selected prototypes will also be considered for addition to Umbra’s growing roster of quality products, to be manufactured, distributed, and sold through the Umbra brand, with royalty. For example, The Bolo Planter by Simone Ferkul, a prototype from the 2017 exhibition, is now produced by Umbra and available for purchase.
Call for submissions
Half of the world’s population now lives in urban centres where real estate is expensive and space is hard to come by. In Toronto alone, average condo sizes have shrunk by over 100 square feet over the last ten years. This has resulted in a trend towards making small spaces more livable and efficient. At the same time, the nature of work has changed drastically. We no longer work 9-5 in standard office spaces. For the knowledge industry, co-working spaces and home offices have proliferated. The boundaries between work, home, and “life” are hard to define.
In being mindful of contemporary living, Work/Life invites designers to design a product for innovative houseware and workware that consider opportunities for multiple functions, storage, space efficiency, personalization, dual utility, entertaining, and other hybrid and micro-living concerns. The exhibition invites designers to think about the whole environment that we live and work in, and welcomes creative responses to the theme.
Submissions will be juried in October. Designers who are selected will be required to produce a prototype of their submitted design and ship the prototype to Toronto in December for showcase in the exhibition in January. Exhibition fees will be paid to designers selected for the exhibition. Exact dates for the prototype submission and ancillary information will be provided.
Design considerations
- An understanding of Umbra’s core values: modern, original, casual, functional, and affordable
- User benefits, multiple uses, ingenuity
- Aesthetics, functionality, manufacturability
- Global appeal
- A product that you want, and that you can afford
Submissions of new work is preferred and strongly encouraged; however, we will consider submissions of work that have not been publicly displayed before.
All submissions must include the following:
- A description of the product (max. 200 words) — please be sure to include the following details: title, function, materials, dimensions;
- a short bio on you and/or your creative practice (max. 150 words);
- 2-3 images of the prototype, such as a digital rendering, drawing, or sketch (max. 1MB per image);
- Your
- contact info (name, email, phone number, mailing address), and
- website URL and/or social media handles (if available);
- Signed copy of Umbra’s Design Submission Agreement (in PDF format) — download the agreement here.
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