The Stadtarbeit format brings together projects that aspire to address the permanent transformation of our urban and social fabric: Projects that search for concrete answers and seek to use design resources as social levers.

In the run-up to the festival, the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK and Erste Bank issued a call for projects, ideas, and concepts that respond to the accompanying theme by addressing resilient neighborhoods and offering design solutions based on social spaces. Three interventions selected by an expert jury are now triggering participative processes in the Focus District and encouraging residents to exchange ideas amongst themselves as well as with the designers and all festival visitors. In their very different ways, these interventions demonstrate how this networking process can enable us to find reliable and effective concepts and solutions for the public realm and for living together in Brigittenau.

This year, the ExtraVALUE Design Award is being awarded for the seventh time. The prize enables the winners to participate in and to realize their project during the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2021. The three winning projects received an implementation budget and prize money.

In addition to the implementation budget, prize money donated by Erste Bank was awarded on 30 September 2021.

Jury Members
Clemens Foschi (Caritas, Erzdiözese Wien),
Martina Frühwirth (Magistrat der Stadt Wien, MA 19),
Stephanie Kneissl (Designer and winner of the ExtraVALUE Design Award 2019)
Lilli Hollein, Gabriel Roland und Hanna Facchinelli (VIENNA DESIGN WEEK),
Ruth Goubran und Theres Fischill (Erste Bank) 

Jury Reasoning

Im20.wien (IDRV) - 500 EUR
The project has worked out that neighbourhood resilience is an organisational issue. It shows what a process in this direction could look like - open, decentralised, digitally supported, equal and participatory. However, the solid conceptual basis and the implementation proposals also show the challenges facing new methods of neighbourhood networking.

Artisans of Public Psyche (Max Scheidl) - 1.000 EUR
Resilience on a large scale, in the common, cannot function without stable participants. In this sense, Max Scheidl has designed interventions with surprising potential for profundity. His Artisans draw attention to the importance of caring for mental well-being and convey awareness of psychological resilience in everyday life. Filled with the project's charisma, which is as engaging as it is gentle, the project provides participants with tangible approaches to action in a low-threshold and playful way.

Missing Link (Marlene Lübke-Ahrens, Wolfgang Nowotny) - 1.500 EUR
Creating a change of perspective is one of the many potentials of design and architecture conceived in a social context. By bridging an overlooked gap in the fabric of the city, the project has achieved this and successfully filled the resulting potential with content, whereby the relationship between selective design intervention and concrete offers was convincing. The project designers have distinguished themselves through great personal commitment, organisational reliability and planning precision with a social sense of proportion.

The Winnings Projects 2021

ARTISANS OF PUBLIC PSYCHE Max Scheidl

What’s really annoying you right now? What could do your psyche some good? And when was the last time that you said something nice to a stranger? The project designed by Max Scheidl – which takes place in the form of a public intervention and as part of the exhibition in this year’s Festival Headquarters of the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK – invites visitors to answer these questions using playful communication tools: Personal stories are collected, technologies questioned, and participants encouraged to share enjoyable and less enjoyable experiences. The project plugs the gap between professional and missing support – thus addressing the stigmatization of psychological stress at exactly a period in which this has become even more urgent: during the pandemic. The intervention generates strategies that, at best, will make us a little more resilient in the face of future challenges. ARTISANS OF PUBLIC PSYCHE was developed in cooperation with the Professional Association of Austrian Psychologists as a diploma project on the Design Investigations course of the University of Applied Art and has been expanded to mark the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2021. 

Festivalzentrale am Sachsenplatz 20., Sachsenplatz 4–6 

The IDRV – Institute of Design Research Vienna investigates how societies form and organize themselves in physical and digital spaces. One tool employed by the participative project is a shared Google Docs file at the web address im20.wien, where the collective know-how of the district community can be retrieved. With the help of technology that is easily accessible (and should also be critically discussed) and used by social and political (protest) movements such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the knowledge of a wide range of people can be rapidly collected, simply structured, and made available to everyone. During the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK, the resulting pool of information about local initiatives and ideas regarding social, ecological, and economic coexistence in the 20th district are being made visible in the urban realm as a means of generating a dialog between festival visitors and the residents of Brigittenau. 

New York’s High Line is world famous. But what many people don’t know is that Vienna also has a former railway viaduct that has been unused for years. The project MISSING-LINK is addressing this existing infrastructural situation between Vienna’s 19th and 20th districts and finding a use for the nine-meter wide and one-kilometer-long space by creating a previously missing constructional link between the Franz-Ippisch-Steg and the track bed of the abandoned Stadtbahn train. The route to Vienna’s High Line Park isn’t a long one: Only a few steps are required to overcome the height difference between the Steg and the former railway. As a result, the wasteland above the arches of the Stadtbahn will be accessible for the duration of the festival, creating an open space that will be occupied by a range of actors exactly where this was previously neither possible nor customary. This will permit the investigation of how places can strengthen communities and benefit both locals and passers-by – with the aim of encouraging possible future use.

MISSING-LINK
19., Franz-Ippisch-Steg (Aufgang Rampengasse nahe Heiligenstädter Straße)