The Share Festival 2008

Yesterday saw the start of this year’s Share Festival, which this year takes on the theme manufacTURINg. I went along to the launch at the Faculty of Architecture department of the Turin Polytechnic, which is in the very pretty, ex-royal-palace, Castello Del Valentino.

Rather like the last event I attended here, I didn’t understand most of what was said apart from when Bruce Sterling (who is the guest curator of the festival) was talking. I could work out a lot more of the words, but still only enough for half sentences here and there.

Anyway, I had a look at some of the exhibits (handily labelled in English as well as Italian), and picked up the festival catalogue (and one for the World Design Capital events too).

There are some very interesting events happening over the next few days for the festival, and it’s frustrating to think that I probably won’t understand much of them. I’m hoping to still attend quite a few, including Manufacturing the Streets this evening, and the chief designer of FIAT talking about the FIAT 500 tomorrow. Then on Saturday I want to catch Massimo Banzi again (I saw him at the Takeaway Festival last year) talking about the Arduino, and Donald Norman and Bruce Sterling (plus two Italians I haven’t heard of) talking about Manufacturing Future Designs. At least with the last one there’ll be some English spoken.

I’ll be posting any photos I take of the festival to my Share Festival 2008 Flickr set and will post my notes here too. If you want to watch any of the sessions but aren’t in Turin, they’re streaming all of the events live.

And if you attend any of the events and spot a confused-looking Englishman, come over and say “Hello”, or “Ciao”, or “Buongiorno”…