Design Platform at Winter Gardens: Sheffield's Public Exhibition
Design Among the Plants
The Winter Gardens is one of Sheffield’s most distinctive public buildings — a soaring glass structure filled with temperate plants, open to everyone and free to enter. Placing a design exhibition inside it, as Sheffield Design Week did in 2016, was a smart curatorial decision. It meant that the work was encountered by people who had not necessarily come looking for design.
Design Platform occupied a section of the Gardens’ ground floor, presenting work from local and regional studios alongside student projects. The juxtaposition of designed objects against the lush green backdrop gave everything a particular quality — cleaner, somehow, as if the natural setting threw the intentionality of designed objects into sharper relief.
Accessibility by Design
I remember speaking to one of the exhibitors, a product designer based in Kelham Island, who described the location as transformative for audience engagement. In a conventional gallery, she said, visitors arrive with expectations. In the Winter Gardens, they arrive with a coffee and curiosity. That distinction mattered — conversations were longer, questions were more open, and the atmosphere was relaxed without being unfocused.
The exhibition included graphic design, product prototypes, architectural models and a small section dedicated to student degree show work. This breadth was both the show’s strength and its challenge. With so much variety, some pieces inevitably received less attention than they deserved.
The Winter Gardens as Venue
The success of Design Platform reinforced what the Winter Gardens offers as a cultural venue: footfall, accessibility and a setting that elevates without intimidating. It is a building that belongs to Sheffield in a way that few public spaces do, and using it for a design exhibition felt appropriate.
The 2016 programme also included the Castlegate Festival and a talk on Dutch urban design, continuing Sheffield Design Week’s engagement with the relationship between design and public life. Design Platform was perhaps the most literal expression of that theme — design, placed directly in the public realm.
