Our POV Budapest 2025 POV
This year Alica, Alex, and Esa met up in Unz-Unz-Unzmarkt to take a little roadtrip to represent okay bueno's Team Austria at POV Budapest, a wonderful, young design conference that has already grown into its own. In only the second edition of the event, the team at POV already managed to gather a who is who of the international design scene, from are.na, one of our favorite online platforms ever, to Modem, from the beautiful work of Studio Dumbar to OpenAI. Impressive line up and great location in the wonderful halls of the Budapest National Dance Theatre.
Notable insight from day one: creative studios are finally not working at the intersection of culture, design, and technology any more, thank god! This trope has now been replaced by what we call "Everything's radical". As we are living in uncertain times everything needs to be an experiment that demands radical measures. While there's certainly a feeling of Zeitgeist reflected in the terminology, it did feel quite contrived in some of talks – is it the new "Challenging the status quo"?
But all jokes aside, there were many great talks. Our personal favorite: the talk from Displaay, one of our favorite type foundries. But also Studio Dumbar did a great job showcasing amazing work while not coming across like trying to pitch themselves, while Wolff Olins walked this line excellently and with so much confidence, presenting rare behind the scenes approaches to outstanding work for Uber and Lloyds. And finally, Modem really got us inspired to build out more crazy ideas and execute the shit out of them without constantly asking ourselves if they really make sense – there's definitely an artistic beauty in taking fundamentally flawed concepts to the next level. A wonderful weirdness to be admired, for sure.
The best talks proved once again to us that humor and personality beat polished reels and self-adulation every single time – and there were more than enough of that to be seen, too. Definitely shots fired at not-to-be-named Swedish studio who boldly claimed that they "taught kids how to play". A little delusional, ey?
To be fair: maybe we were just a little jaded. And of course they presented outstanding work, as did all the others on stage. But our first night out led us deep into the underbelly of the Budapest nightlife scene and energy levels on day two definitely reflected that. If one thing can be said about Team Austria, then it's that they don't know when to stop – but always show up the next day. See also: hellas bueno and okay dobro!
2025 was a hell of a (car) ride. Already looking forward to 2026.
