Building a Thriving Ukrainian Design Community Now

Ukraine’s diverse and often fragmented design community gathered in Kyiv over a late summer weekend in August. For the second year in a row, DVRZ Design Days offered a program of expositions, interactive zones, lectures, and workshops at four sites spread across the Ukrainian capital, from the Sviatoshyn District in the west to Podil’ and Kurenivka to the north. 

Ukraine’s interior, urban, industrial, fashion, graphic, and civil designers have not thought of themselves as a single profession. Some of these divisions are characteristic of an occupation that often divides itself between those who lean towards artistic pursuits and those who are drawn towards engineering. Soviet tendencies to box off professions by categories only intensified such differences. 

Faced with the collapse of a state-dominated centralized economy following independence, many design fields fell prey to rapacious privateers. As Design Days organizer Larisa Tsybina put it, “even before the war, the development of Ukrainian design was very fragmented and slow. We did not have support from the state, from foundations that could take care of this area.”

Other divisions emerged as well between those looking to push Ukrainian design towards contemporary trends in Europe and those who cherish more traditional approaches to the visual environment. Some trendsetters sought to integrate old and new, as well as Western and Ukrainian design, with varying degrees of success. Until now, they often have been cut off from those looking back and those looking forward.

Design in all of its divisions will be at the center of any attempt to rebuild Ukraine following the current war. Postwar Ukraine will require freshly designed engineering infrastructure, new symbolic visions for a distinctly “Ukrainian” look in fashion and iconography, fresh architectural approaches to cityscapes, and technical standards which are in sync with those of Europe. At present, divisions in the design world—which range from the profession’s various subfields to various ideological perspectives on the appropriate balance between the national and international—put a unified approach to the country’s postwar reconstruction in question. 

Tsybina and her colleagues have organized the Design Days event to begin the process of bridging these gaps between areas of the design profession, of attracting students to consider careers in the design field, and of educating the public about why design is important. They hope that such collaboration will make it possible to work with Ukrainian materials to design boldly and to address the challenges ahead. Beyond Ukraine, the Design Days gatherings seek to find new ways to bring the achievements of Ukrainian designers to the international community.

These goals are present as well in a new magazine focusing on Ukrainian design launched in May. According to its editors, The Chronicle of Ukrainian Design “is an attempt to see and show how Ukrainian design identity was born and evolved.” The editors and sponsors are looking to rediscover a distinctive design history that reveals what was lost during the Soviet era. The magazine covers all areas of design in an effort to present a holistic vision that is functional, respectful of tradition, and innovative. 

Magazine co-founder Nastichka Zherebetska described the mission this way on the website: “Ukrainian culture is on the verge of annihilation again, so we need to invest as much as possible in preserving the existing and restoring the forgotten. We need to find ourselves, dig into history, fill in historical gaps and talk about what Ukrainian design is. And for a modern designer, this is almost the only opportunity to somehow make a mark in this fast-paced world.”

Ukraine’s ability to rebuild following the war rests in part on the capacity of its professional design community to enable physical, symbolic, and spiritual reconstruction. The establishment of the DVRZ Design Days and the launching of The Chronicle of Ukrainian Design both recognize that such success will rest on developing the professional, artistic, and intellectual prerequisites for a thriving design community now.

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.