Jae-Sung Chon, the curator of the 2019 Winnipeg Design Festival, believes that the Manitoba capital should be a city for prototyping new ideas. “Let’s rebrand Winnipeg as a proto-city: a city where new ideas are accepted as its core urbanism,” he says.With his design team at STUFF (Studio for Transformative Urban Forms and Fields), he has developed this year’s program under the theme PROTO.

It will focus on encouraging, embracing, celebrating, and respecting the idea of the ‘first-in-time’ or ‘first-of’ within Winnipeg’s dynamic design culture, and include the inaugural Winnipeg Design Festival Awards. The curatorial team will work with an Inuit Artist to design the trophies that will be awarded to contemporary designers, including young/emerging, experimental/proto- and an ex-Winnipeger of excellence.

Winnipeg Design Festival is the largest annual event of StorefrontMB, a not-for-profit initiative focused on exposing the strengths within the local design culture. Since its inception in 2011, the festival has fuelled a growth of public awareness and appreciation towards the rich community of talented individuals and groups. Past participants and speakers include 5468796 Architecture, 1×1 Architecture, Public City Architecture, Thom Fougere, Lennard Taylor, Freya Bjorg Olafson, and John Patkau.