Elisava at Barcelona Design Week 26

On October 14, Elisava will serve as the opening venue of Barcelona Design Week, joining the event’s official programme as a space for exchange, reflection and experimentation around design and its capacity to generate positive impact in society.

To mark the occasion, Elisava will host a programme open to the entire community featuring exhibitions, talks, a performance and workshops led by professionals and experts from the field. Through these activities, attendees will discover new perspectives, methodologies and projects that demonstrate how design can act as a tool for innovation, critical thinking and cultural transformation.

Below, you can explore the schedule of the main activities and register for those that interest you most. Find out more and reserve your place!

The present is the place from which we interpret the past and imagine the future. Understanding the current reality of design requires a critical, human-centered perspective, engaged with the social, cultural, and technological context that surrounds us.

This session focuses on the present state of design through the perspective of Elisava’s younger faculty members, who will share their professional experience and reflections on the current reality of the discipline.

Drawing on critical analysis, reflection, and personal experiences, participants will address the challenges, opportunities, and contradictions of contemporary design from a deeply humanistic perspective. The session will conclude with an open roundtable discussion aimed at fostering debate on the role of design today and its future trajectories.

• Date: October 14
• Time: 11.00h – 12.30h
• Venue: Lecture Hall Aleix Carrió, Elisava
• Speakers: Júlia Esqué, Manuela Valtchanova, Iván Paz y Maria Charneco
• Moderator: Francesca Tur
• Language: Catalan / Spanish

What can the archive of a design school reveal after sixty-five years of activity?

This exhibition takes the documents preserved by the Elisava Historical Archive as its starting point to interpret the transformations that have shaped the evolution of design, the profession, and the institution itself.

The exhibition is structured around six major processes of transformation that run through Elisava’s history: the evolution of its pedagogical model, the incorporation of technology as a core design competency, the consolidation of the profession, the shift from transmitting knowledge to generating it, international openness, and the role of memory as a tool for interpreting the past and imagining the future.

• Date: From October 14 to December 9
• Time: Opening at 12:30 pm. Visits from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm
• Venue: Sala Ágora (1st Floor), Elisava
• Admission: Free entry
• Led by: Marta González, Dean of Elisava, and Francesc Ribot, Coordinator of the Bachelor’s Degree in Design and Innovation and Exhibition Curator.

I open my eyes and, in front of the mirror, I observe a body that is both familiar and unfamiliar to me. I move closer slowly, wondering who I am, and I realize that I am everything I do not know. Then, within the layers of tissue, I discover a set of vibrations passing through me. Suddenly, I return to the mirror, where a body reveals itself to me that is no longer an image, but a body that possesses sonic matter.

This project stems from the need to understand my relationship with my own sound and how it shapes my identity. Through the body, objects, and technology, I explore the possibility of listening to myself from a different perspective, transforming my body into an instrument, a material, and a sonic space.

Alumna Jordina Cascante presents The Acoustics of the Self, a sound performance developed from her Final Degree Project. An exercise in deep listening in the form of an immersive experience that questions our perception of ourselves and opens up new ways of inhabiting one’s own identity.

• Date: October 20
• Time: 19.30h
• Venue: Rooms 215 – 218, Elisava
• Capacity: 50 attendees
• Duration: 15 minutes
• Performer: Jordina Cascante, alumn of the Bachelor in Design and Innovation
• Organised by: Bachelor in Design and Innovation

In this web prototyping and vibe coding workshop, held as part of Barcelona Design Week, we will explore how artificial intelligence can help us creatively build interfaces for exploring personal archives. At a time when AI is flooding the internet with generated content, participants will start from their own collection, a family archive or a small dataset to create something intimate that only they could make. The aim is to emphasize each participant’s own narrative perspective: finding the story within the archive and turning it into a way of interacting with it. Just as the Uncoded Gestures project explores Poblenou’s photographic archive through body movement, we seek to make interaction not an added effect, but the central axis of the narrative.

During the three-hour session, led by Domestic Data Streamers, participants will work with AI tools to move quickly from archive to functional digital experience. The workshop proposes a way of understanding AI as an ally that enables us to test formats in a single afternoon that we might otherwise never attempt to build. Above all, the focus will be on learning where the machine helps us most (code, speed) and where it is essential not to lose our own voice (perspective, archive and narrative judgement).

• Time: From 18.30h to 21.30h
• Capacity: 56 attendees
• Location: Class room 204 A and 204 B , Elisava
• Language: English
• Led by: Maria Costa, Creative Technologist at Domestic Data Streamers
• Organised by: Master in Applied AI for Arts and Design

A retrospective presentation of projects by students from Bachelor in Design and Bachelor in Industrial Design, developed in collaboration with Swiss company USM Modular Furniture, which has been developing modular solutions for homes and workspaces for more than 50 years. Today, the company is a global design icon and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Over the course of a year, students work in collaboration with the USM team to develop their Final Degree Projects, exploring different applications of the USM system with the aim of creating new furniture solutions that address the challenges of the future. The result is a series of original, free, creative and non-industrialised proposals that reinterpret this design classic.

This exhibition presents a selection of Elisava projects developed over the five years of collaboration with the brand, celebrating a relationship that has become a space for experimentation, research and innovation. The exhibition highlights emerging student talent and the ability of design to imagine new ways of living, working and interacting with objects, all based on a modular system that continues to demonstrate its relevance and versatility.

Other collaborative exhibitions:

Amics de la Rambla

This exhibition brings together a selection of projects developed through the collaboration between Amics de la Rambla and Elisava to rethink the concept of the contemporary souvenir. Drawing on a critical perspective on tourism and local identity, students have designed objects of memory inspired by the culture, traditions, and materiality of Barcelona, and particularly La Rambla. The exhibition highlights design as a tool for generating new narratives about the city while showcasing collaborations with local craftspeople in the development of the prototypes.

IKEA · Cadires al carrer

An exhibition bringing together the proposals developed by more than 200 students from the Bachelor’s Degree in Design and Innovation as part of the annual collaboration between Elisava and IKEA. Through the reinterpretation of ROBIN, one of the Swedish company’s most iconic chair designs, students explore new forms, uses, and meanings of the object while applying principles of sustainability, innovation, and product design. The exhibition highlights the creative process and demonstrates design’s ability to challenge and transform everyday objects.

Finestres Bookstore

The result of a collaboration between Finestres Bookstore and Elisava, this exhibition brings together a selection of Final Degree Projects from the Bachelor’s Degree in Design and Innovation, developed jointly by students, the Faculty, and the bookstore. The projects explore new ways of understanding books, reading, and cultural spaces, highlighting the printed book as a cultural and emotional artefact and reading as a tool for critical thinking in an increasingly accelerated society. The exhibition creates a dialogue between design and culture while proposing new approaches to the reading experience.

TOUS 

This exhibition brings together a selection of Final Degree Projects developed as part of the collaboration between TOUS and Elisava. The projects explore new ways of understanding innovation, creativity, and branding from a strategic perspective, addressing real challenges proposed by the company. Through research, experimentation, and future scenario building, the proposals demonstrate how design can create new opportunities and responses for brands operating in a context of constant transformation.

• Dates: October 14 – 25
• Time: From 9h to 21h
• Venue: Atri (1st floor)
• Admission: Free entry