About SLDF
Sri Lanka Design Festival (SLDF) is South Asia’s most commercially successful, and business-friendly platform celebrating design and innovation in fashion, interior design, furniture, and graphic-and-visual communication. This annual event hosts an inspiring series of conferences, exhibitions, workshops, and talks that bridge international and local knowledge, and tradecraft in design-led innovation.
Innovation Island
Colombo Innovation Tower
A Gateway to Regional Design
‘Innovation Island’ premiers Sri Lanka as South Asia’s fresh creative dynamic and as a place where a powerful new ecosystem converging creativity, innovation, and business, is in the making ...
October 17th-26th, 2020
SLDF 2018 Delegates
Exploring Dutch Innovation
SLDF 2018 hosted an influential delegation of Dutch designers, innovators, and creative industry experts, as keynote speakers and mentors focused on drawing up a national strategy for creative industries.
Vera Winthagen
Vera Winthagen is a designer. She has worked as a consultant in sustainable product development in Vietnam and as a social designer and project leader at the renowned design agency VanBerlo. She also did research and taught at the Technical University in Eindhoven (TU / e). She was, among other things, project manager of the 'Designing Out Crime' program.
Stella van Himbergen
Stella van Himbergen has been the director and owner of Dutch Design in Development (DDID) for over 10 years. She helps companies with developing circular propositions for their products and services. She combines circular design and business models with fair trade, eco effective production technique, market positioning and branding. Stella is also Sector Coordinator Circular Consumer Goods and trainer at CIRCO in The Netherlands, and is responsible for the development of strategic relationships with stakeholders (companies and institutions) in various sectors.
Ir. A.W.M. (Bart) Ahsmann
Bart Ahsmann graduated in 1988 with a degree in Industrial Design at TU Delft, followed by 13 years of professional design experience for Dutch design consultancies. This is where he developed his skills in developing sustainable consumer and industry products for major (inter)national manufacturing and SME clients. In 2001 he joined Syntens, working on innovation consultancy for Dutch SMEs. While there, he initiated partnerships with knowledge institutes and was involved in developing new innovation methods. In 2009 he joined TU Delft to stimulate and professionalise knowledge transfer in design research. He was
responsible for initiating and developing a number of large-scale research and innovation projects, industry partnerships, design start-ups, and the 3TU Research Centre Design United. Amongst others, he was one of the architects of the major Dutch research programme CRISP (2011-2015).
responsible for initiating and developing a number of large-scale research and innovation projects, industry partnerships, design start-ups, and the 3TU Research Centre Design United. Amongst others, he was one of the architects of the major Dutch research programme CRISP (2011-2015).
Renz Tap
Rens Tap is Business Development Manager of Modint, the Dutch Association of clothing and textiles companies. Over 30 years of working with Modint, Rens Tap has been actively following the technology and innovation trends in the Dutch textile and fashion sector, as market researcher and strategic consultant to the members of Modint. He has extensive experience with and understanding of the fashion business from consumer behavior, retail, wholesale, down to production and design.
Prof. Dr. Ir. Christine De Lille
Prof. Dr. Ir. Christine De Lille has been Professor of Innovation Networks at the Faculty of Business, Finance & Marketing at The Hague University of Applied Sciences since September 2017. She is co-founder of several innovation platforms and also works as an Assistant Professor at ‘User-centred Design of Business’ for the Industrial Design Engineering Faculty at Delft University of Technology. This is where she studied and earned her PhD in 2014 (in combination with Utrecht University of Applied Sciences).
Drs. Lucie M. Huiskens
Drs. Lucie Huiskens MBA (1958) is co-founder and program coordinator CLICKNL|NextFashion (currently NL NextFashion & Textiles), the innovation network of the fashion sector, part of topsector Creative Industries. She is also program manager of the Centre of Expertise Future Makers (FM) at ArtEZ university of the Arts. FM has the characteristics of a lab and studio for interdisciplinary design based research. The main goal of FM is to develop more sustainable value chains for products and services in the field of fashion, textiles, product and interior design.
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The Venue
SLDF 2020 events will be hosted at the new Colombo Innovation Tower. Located in the heart of Colombo, spanning 20 floors and 120,000 sq. ft, CIT is a space dedicated to innovation-led by design and technology.
SLDF 2018 Events
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The Experience
SLDF 2018 events took place from November 9th - 11th at Trace City in Colombo. The programme included AOD design showcases, fashion runways, and industry forums and workshops.
