Bob Gill headlines designjunction NYC as part of the city’s design festival

Illustrator and designer Bob Gill will headline the talks programme at this year’s designjunction + Dwell On Design event in New York, as part of the city’s design festival later this week. Hosted at ArtBeam in Chelsea, the event will host a series of talks alongside an exhibition of contemporary product design.

The founding partner of Fletcher/Forbes/Gill, that would go on to become Pentagram, will be the keynote speaker on Friday 13 May. He will be joined on the bill by Caroline Baumann, director of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Dorothy Cosonas, creative director at KnollTextiles; artist Tom Sachs; and Dong-Ping Wong and Oana Stanescu, directors of New York architecture firm Family.

The NYCxDesign festival also features fairs like ICFF, WantedDesign and Sight Unseen Offsite among a plethora of smaller events.

Sight Unseen Offsite has commissioned a large-scale installation by New York architecture studio Leong Leong, conceived as an immersive and experiential harmonic landscape, that draws inspiration from the design of the new Ford Edge. Topo will transform around 1000 foam rollers into a “kind of musical instrument”, lined by mirrors to create a mind-bending visual effect. This will be created in partnership with Arup.

The show will also feature a series of collaborations between five American and five Norwegian design studios resulting in new work, including Assembly Design with Morten & Jonas, Bower with Bjorn Van Den Berg, Farrah Sit with Silje Nesdal, Jonah Takagi with Hallgeir Homstvedt, and Ladies & Gentlemen with Vera & Kyte.

NYCxDesign takes place until 17 May.