San Diego Design Week begins Tuesday, bringing roughly 75 tours, talks, workshops and showcases to venues across the county through Sept. 20. The sixth annual festival is organized by the nonprofit Design Forward Alliance and is mostly free, with programming organized around themes including multimedia, digital work, spaces, fashion, and health and well-being, according to the official schedule and Times of San Diego.
This year’s theme, “Design for Everyone,” gives the festival a practical question beyond the exhibits themselves: how easily can people reach, enter and use the places where design is presented? That question matters across a countywide program whose venues include museums, cultural institutions, hotels, theaters and public spaces.
What to know about the program
The festival’s new fashion and costume-design track is scheduled to include a Sept. 17 program at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla, with work by local designers and students from Palomar College and Mesa College, the Times reported. The track also includes tours and discussions, including a ticketed behind-the-scenes visit to the San Diego History Center’s clothing collection featuring garments associated with Zandra Rhodes and Bob Mackie, according to the History Center.
Other listed highlights include tours of the La Jolla Playhouse costume department and an Uptown sewing collective, along with programming on designer Isaac Mizrahi, a Zandra Rhodes documentary preview and a “dazzle lab,” according to the Times’ account. The full schedule, including registration and ticket information for individual events, is available through Design Week’s program listing.
The festival’s Sept. 19 “The Art of Design” reception is scheduled at The Guild downtown in collaboration with the JFIN Collective, according to the Times. The hotel occupies a former Army-Navy YMCA building constructed in 1924 and opened as a hotel in 2019, according to Wallpaper*.
Accessibility is part of the route, not just the venue
San Diego’s public accessibility work provides useful context for a festival that asks what “design for everyone” means in practice. The City says its current public-right-of-way project is evaluating pedestrian routes and documenting features such as curb ramps, crosswalks, audible pedestrian signals, accessible parking and sidewalk barriers, with the results intended to inform an updated transition plan. The first phase generally covers neighborhoods south of Interstate 8, including most of the city’s historically disadvantaged communities, according to the City of San Diego.
That project concerns streets and other public rights-of-way; it does not establish accessibility conditions inside privately operated or cultural venues. Visitors should therefore check the individual event listing and venue before traveling. The City says San Diego adopted its original accessibility self-evaluation and transition plan in 1996 and that major facility barriers identified in that plan have been remediated, while the current effort is updating information about public-right-of-way access.
For the festival’s La Jolla programming, MCASD says its public areas, galleries and restrooms are wheelchair accessible and that the museum provides ramps, power-assist doors, elevators and wheelchairs on request. For events in Balboa Park, the park’s accessibility guidance lists accessible parking and bathrooms, wheelchair-accessible entrances and facilities, sensory programming, and captioned or translated audio tours and films; the City says its Balboa Park trams have ADA-accessible ramps. Those published accommodations are useful planning information, but attendees should confirm event-specific conditions directly with organizers.
Design Week’s significance, then, is not only the number of events it gathers. It is also an opportunity to test the festival’s central promise against the ordinary details of participation: the route to a venue, the entrance, the elevator, the restroom, the available information and the accommodations offered once visitors arrive.
