The Budapest Design Week event series was launched in 2004 by the Hungarian Design Council upon the initiative of Design Terminal Nonprofit Assoc. and under the patronage of the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office. The programme series was successfully positioned as the most important event of the Hungarian design scene as early as its first year. I took part in working for the Design Week as a senior curator and project manager between 2008 and April 2013, and managed 5 festivals from start to finish; developing the BDW festival to become a 10-day series of events, building its international prestige and coming up with its permanent programme elements all happened on my watch: Star Designer, Guest Country, Open Studios, shopping promotions and BDW Gastro.

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The Design Week celebrated its fifth anniversary in 2008, the year I joined its team. We increased the number of its participating partners by 20%, and today, there are more than 70 programmes awaiting visitors. Due to the vast range of events and the huge interest they generate, the festival was expanded into a ten-day series. In 2008 the first star designer arrived in Hungary as part of the official Design Week programme: The presentation held by Marcel Wanders at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest was no less than a sensation at the festival’s jubilee celebrations. This year also saw the introduction of international communication, taking news about our festival to the wide world, kicking off the process aimed at ensuring international visibility for Design Week and building its international reputation. The highly successful Design Week Discount (with the participation of 60 shops) also made its debut in 2008. A shift also took place in Design Week’s target group that year, with a clear focus on the 20s and 30s age group.

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The festival was given a new visual identity in 2009 with not only its entire image having been revamped, but its name also extended with the word Budapest, thus contributing to the Hungarian festival being placed on the map of European design weeks. Budapest Design Week broke new records both regarding the number of events (87) and cooperating partners (163); moreover, each element of its communication—from the website through the programme brochure to daily newsletters—became bilingual (Hungarian and English). Two new elements were introduced: The Design Management Award, established by the Hungarian Design Council, and the Open Studios, the festival’s core event during which the public was able to get an insight into the daily work of designers by visiting the studios of 16 contemporary designers. Open Studios has been one of the most popular programmes of the festival ever since.

The Design Terminal’s emblematic opening exhibition titled In Competition explored the competitiveness of Hungarian intellectual capital and displayed internationally successful products developed with the participation of Hungarian designers. 

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Budapest Design Week further expanded its scale in 2010 (120 events) and offered its 60,000 visitors a record number of programmes it organised itself. It veritably positioned itself as the most important and most prestigious domestic festival and attained countrywide significance. The Budapest Design Week brand’s core programmes –Open Studios, the Design Tours and the Design Week Discount – underwent significant development, and an unprecedented number of creative workshops were held for children and adults alike to diversify the offering. The festival’s official Facebook page was launched and Dezeen, the world’s leading online design medium, endorsed the festival as an international media sponsor. Celebrating its 20th jubilee in 2010, IKEA Hungary entered into strategic partnership with the Budapest Design Week; besides contributing many memorable events, the company provided greater visibility for the festival festival in its communication campaign than it had enjoyed in any previous year.​

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The theme of the BDW 2011 was Couleur Locale. The opening exhibition I organised with the participation of experts from 29 European countries displayed the unique colours of local visual cultures, i.e. the cultural DNA of individual nations, through 90 new objects. This year saw the broadest, Europe-wide cooperation in the history of the festival. Within the span of a few days, the large-scale exhibition attracted 15,000 visitors and considerable international attention.

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A new element was also added to the Budapest Design Week brand: Aimed at further increasing the festival’s international prestige and visibility, the Guest of Honour Country programme was launched and invited Poland, which held the rotating EU Presidency in 2011, as its first guest of honour. Having joined the forefront of the EU, contemporary Polish design debuted with exhibitions, as well as a jewellery and fashion show, while the country’s emblematic professionals held presentations in Budapest. Intended to start a tradition, the Design Week Gastro event diversified the festival’s palette even further in 2011, lending food design a marked presence: The design fest presented products (menus, edible gifts, food creations) developed specifically for the Design Week by the most progressive members of the Budapest gastronomy scene.  

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The Budapest Design Week, organised for the ninth time in 2012, offered visitors 130 events at 120 venues across the capital. Its opening exhibition built around the year’s slogan Live slower! Slow Design showcased the culture of slow design with the help of more than 80 design products and projects. This exhibition, which I curated, presented a selection from the most progressive design creations of 12 countries and drew in 15,000 visitors, making it the most successful and attractive exhibit in the history of Design Weeks. That year saw the consolidation of the guest of honour programme launched the year before: In 2012 the festival invited Finland, with its highlighted guest being the Fiskars arts village, located some 100 kilometres from Helsinki and perhaps the most beautiful and world famous example of slow life, slow design, design and craft. This year’s festival was organised with the participation of a large number of foreign guests arriving as exhibitors and presenters, including Finnish and Israeli designers. The star designers of 2012 were Ineke Hans of the Netherlands and Fabio Novembre of Italy, both distinguished by an individual voice. The most important change this year was the introduction of a fee for for-profit businesses participating in the state-financed Design Week, which had attracted audiences of 60,000 year by year. This strategic decision—based on the festival’s professional brand building consistently carried out from 2004, the development of its professional content, its ever-higher standards and European competitiveness—did not reduce either the number of cooperating partners (220) nor their enthusiasm.