With design festivals staged throughout the year in over 100 cities around the world, it’s hard to believe that the Spanish capital of Madrid only just started its own. Launched with the theme of “Redesigning the World,” an optimistic sentiment transcended through the exhibitions, installations, events, and talks happening across the city throughout February.

Max Fraser shared some of his must-sees from this newcomer on the design festival scene. The work of prolific Spanish designer Jaime Hayon has been celebrated across the world but this was the first time he staged a retrospective on his home soil.

Curated by much-respected local Ana Domínguez-Siemens, the exhibition welcomed visitors into the optimistic world of Hayon, bringing together some of the works from his signature art installations to charismatic furniture and objects. The aim was to reveal the behind the scenes of Hayon’s practice and celebrate the thinking and processes that go into his playful and often whimsical creations, giving insight into the fantasy worlds that he strives to create.

The design of household appliances has evolved significantly over the course of the 20th century, thanks mostly to technological advances. Of course, beyond functional efficiency, the look and tactility of everything from refrigerators, blenders, toasters, and irons to telephones, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and televisions changed considerably in relatively short periods of time.

If you take offense at the design of kettles, toasters, and washing machines today, be revived by this exhibition celebrating the most significant pieces from the collection of Alfaro Hofmann. Digital Nature is a showcase of five video installations by artist Jennifer Steinkamp, who has generated compositions of trees, stems and flowers that are projected over the room, blurring the architecture and animating the walls.

The works were inspired by Marie Curie, the famous scientist who received two Nobel Prizes for her pioneering research in the field of radioactivity. The artist pays tribute to the scientist’s great passion for plants by rendering over 40 botanical species in her large-scale synchronized projections. The result makes us reflect on the effects that explosions and atomic energy have on nature.

Another show curated by Ana Dominguez Siemens, Experience the Difference, celebrated society’s increasing desire for imperfections and signs of the human touch in our objects. The exhibition brought together some experimental works from contemporary designers who were interested in moving away from the uniformity of mass-production. Instead, these talents push processes and explore ideas from a conceptual viewpoint and raise questions for debate. The exhibition also showed how these same ideas are now commercialized by companies in response to the consumers’ yearning for an individual identity portrayed through their possessions.