2024 Young Designers' Exhibition: Beyond Sustainability

The "Young Designers’ Exhibition" (YODEX) is a 43-year-old annual event in Taiwan and a large-scale group exhibition that showcases works by graduating students from design schools nationwide and industry-academia collaboration projects. It aims to connect the design industry and academia, helping local businesses discover talented designers, and promote innovation in design education, bridging the gap between academic learning and industry needs.

Themed “Beyond Sustainability," the 2024 YODEX reflected international and industrial trends, encouraging emerging designers to achieve SDGs through design. The organizing team responded to the theme with the “The Borrowing Project” curatorial concept, turning topical discussions into tangible actions by way of “borrowing” to establish a new model for sustainable exhibitions.

The team “borrowed” raw materials from everyday life, such as timber and bricks from construction sites, metal pipes from factories, and landscaping stones from gardening companies, and made use of the original specifications and characteristics of these materials to create the exhibition space through methods like taking apart, stacking, and bundling. For example, brick pallets were stacked to create walls, countertops, and seating, while borrowed wood is bundled to form bases for displays. Standard-sized materials without additional adhesives or cutting were used as display platforms and panels, maximizing their potential for reuse. Seats in salon areas were crafted by stacking metal pipes from furniture factories, temporarily fastened with screws.

After the exhibition, all materials were taken apart and returned for circular processing, as if they had taken a detour from the destined life cycle. This approach minimized single-use consumption, and presented a future-oriented view of “enabling sustainable existence of things.”

Emerging designers were also guided to respond to the theme from different aspects, such as using standard panel sizes and rented display frames to reduce unnecessary processing. This significantly cut down on the exhibition’s environmental footprint and aligns with its green objectives.

Through the organizers' active practices and the designers’ participation, the 2024 YODEX transformed into a practical platform for sustainable design and showcased emerging designers’ sensitivity to societal issues, offering more possibilities of sustainability and leaving profound impacts on design education and industry.