Get your creative on: DC Design Week starts next Friday

“D.C. is design.”
That’s the message Dan Rader and his co-organizers of AIGA’s DC Design Week are trying to communicate this year. The District-based chapter of AIGA, a professional organization for design, has been organizing DC Design Week for 33 years now. As you might be able to imagine, a lot has changed in those years.
For one, the definition of who qualifies as a “designer” has changed. AIGA was once solely the purview of graphic designers but now, Rader said, they’re welcoming more UI and UX designers, product designers, front-end developers and more. Being a designer now is less about the title and “more about the way that we think” and Rader, for one, thinks that’s a great thing.
“This year we’re totally turning it upside down,” Rader said of organizing this year’s event. “It’s not about AIGA, it’s about the city.”
And in order to make DC Design Week about the city, organizers are partnering with a host of other District-based businesses and interest groups — from &pizza to Women Who Code DC — to put on events.
See the events calendar
“We want to put D.C. on the map for design,” Rader said. “I want someone who is in Baltimore or Philly to be like ‘D.C. is the place to become a designer.'”
The week takes place Oct. 21-29 and is totally packed with events. Check out the DC Design Week website for a full listing. One that might specifically interest the more technical among us? On Friday, Oct. 28 Deloitte Digital is hosting a screening of What Comes Next is the Future, a documentary film about the web.