SF Design Week Opening Night Reception
JUNE 7th • 6:30–9:30PMSF Design Week kicks off with a special opening night reception. SFDW celebrates and promotes the essential week-long city-wide festival that showcases the unique intersection of ideas, design, business & entrepreneurism that makes the Bay Area the birthplace of the future.
Highlights include:
- Airbnb Design Interactive Experience Unveiling
- San Francisco Design Week Awards Exhibition
- Design Experience created by artists Leah Rosenberg (Creative Director of the Color Factory) and JD Beltran
- 'Philanthropost' by Britelite Immersive: a storytelling sculpture to support artist endeavors
- Stanford d.school environmental exhibit
- Artist installations by 4 Letter Word by Purin Phanichphant Brian Singer & Chloe Bensahel
- Check out our 'Start-up Alley' featuring tables and displays of new tech or products by emerging companies
- Enjoy contemporary music by Matt EL and dance performance by CALI & CO
- Live music from DJ Cira, engineer at Slack
- Delightful offerings available for purchase at food trucks by Off the Grid, and beer by Fort Point Brewery
- Interactive displays and tables will be placed throughout the space featuring products from the industry
Each guest that is 21+ will receive one voucher for a Fort Point beer! Additional drinks are available for purchase.
Enter promo: SFDWfriend25 for $25 tickets!
Design Hub Workshops, Panels and Talks
JUNE 7 • 9:00AM–4:45PM JUNE 8 • 9:00AM–8:00PM
On Thursday, June 7th from 9:00am–4:45pm and Friday, June 8th, from 9:00am-8:00pm, the Design Hub will transform into a space for forward-thinking presentations, unique workshops, exhibitions, and design installations. Food will be available for purchase throughout the day from Off the Grid food trucks.
Interested in spending the day at the Design Hub but worried about last-minute meetings or deadlines? Reserve a slot (for free) at the Dovetail X co-working space! Recent graduate or looking to switch roles? Bring your portfolio for mini portfolio reviews from 24/Seven.
The exhibition space will be FREE and open to the public on during the days. Events below require separate ticketing.
Psst...Save the lineup to your phone so you don't miss a second!Highlights

Getting to your first dollar: Prototyping and testing business models with Peer Insight
Workshop - June 7, 9:00AM–12:00PM
You have used the best user-centered design methods to co-create with and validate that customers love your killer new idea, now what? Design thinking is a problem-solving toolkit optimized for the unknown. It’s commonly used to explore user needs, but how do we apply its core principles to the business model?

Design Ethics with Mike Monteiro, Talk & Workshop
Talk - June 7, 12:45PM–1:45PM Workshop - June 8, 9:00AM–1:00PM
Like every other human being on the planet we share, designers are part of the social contract. By choosing to be a designer you are choosing to affect the people who come in contact with your work. Learn how to tell if your work will hurt or help those people and how to measure social impact alongside shareholder value.
Purchase a ticket to the workshop

A Blueprint for Blockchain: Designing For Emerging Tech with IDEO Colab, Coinbase, Ethex, ConsenSys
June 7, 2:15-3:15PM
How might we design best practices for technologies that don’t yet have best practices? What are some ways designers can get involved in blockchain? Join us for an interactive and engaging panel session on designing for blockchain and the distributed web.

UNDISCIPLINED: Design, Commerce and Culture DC Shoes, Indicate Design Groupe, Philip Wood
June 7, 3:30-4:30PM
Richard Hansen (Indicate Design Groupe) and Damon Way (DC Shoes, Incase, FACT.) in conversation moderated by Philip Wood. There are many paths to success and many ways to become a successful designer. One way is more traditional: school, apprenticeship, job. And then there’s the path that Rich Hansen and Damon Way took: Two kids who had a vision to make it happen on their own terms, creating and producing work before anyone gave them license to. Without any boundaries, their creativity thrived and in this conversation, we will be discussing street culture, DIY business, how punk engenders entrepreneurship, and how risk-taking with action sports lead into risks taken with design and business. We’ll find a lot to be inspired by from these self-made design world heroes including how maybe your college days were misspent or not misspent enough.

Women in Leadership & Design Lounge
June 8, 8:30AM-5:00PM
Join WILD at the San Francisco Design Week Hub at Pier 27 and meet throughout the day on June 8th from 8:30 am to 5 pm with other women in the design community. Join us in the morning for coffee from Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, a fireside chat with Alessandra Wood, Director of Style at Modsy, and San Francisco Design Week artist, Chloe Bensahel. The day will conclude with a happy hour featuring wine from Nasty Women Wines.

Bringing Romance Back to Art in the Age of Digital Design New York Times, House Industries, HP
June 8, 10:00-11:00AM
The New York Times’ Creative-at-Large Mark Borden hosts a conversation on bringing romance back to art in the age of digital design with Andy Cruz, Co-Founder of House Industries and Enrique Lores, President of HP Imaging and Printing. Analog creatives have a unique emotional connection to their work – the feeling of a press and smell of its ink. But in the past decade, a forced entry into digital design has sanitized the experience from start to finish. As Silicon Valley reunites with peoples’ craving for tangibility, sweeping changes in print technology are bringing romance back to digital design.