Curator reflects on his journey from pottery to establishing Vienna Design Week: “When I started, design was more about fun and novelty. Today, it’s about transforming for a sustainable future. That requires a more critical approach to design.”

Designer Miguel Leiro reflects on his influences: “Archaeologists are reverse designers—they find something and then figure out how it was made, how it was used, and who used it. This opened my eyes to a more objective understanding of objects and materials.”

Sculpture is reimagined in the work of Erwin Wurm: “Frustration is always a part of an artist's life because I think one great idea in an artist's career is, by far, not enough. One needs to always develop new ideas, it's a constant challenge.”

Artist Xue Lei’s work spans artificial intelligence, the metaverse, new media interactive art, and ceramics: “AI captures datasets that can be understood as a collection of existing human knowledge, but this knowledge generation inherently has biases. Therefore, it leads to significant deviations produced by these communication hot words.”