Last Thursday I stopped by Eastern Market After Dark, part of this year’s Detroit Design Festival. Starting at dusk, the event was a self-guided walking tour of the neighborhood’s creative community. People had flooded in for the tour and it was great to see the area, known primarily for its Saturday farmer’s market, bustling with so much activity on a weekday night. There was way too much going on for me to cover in a single post so instead here are a couple of the event’s highlights that will hopefully give you a better idea of the how exciting it was.

OmniCorpDetroit: The converted warehouse that serves as the hackerspace for the engineers, artists and designers of OmniCorpDetroit is the sort of thing you have to see to believe. The interior is part Salvador Dali, part MacGyver and all mad scientist. If a 100-foot tall robot ever runs amok in downtown Detroit I suspect we’d find the members of OmniCorpDetroit all looking a bit sheepish and doing their best to whistle nonchalantly.

OmniCorp Detroit has finally answered that age old question: What would Scooby Doo look like as a Transformer?

Signal-Return: As the son of a bookbinder a lot of what I saw at Signal-Return was old hat to me. I grew up in a house with multiple nipping presses, far too many trays of movable type and a cast-iron board shear the size of a dining room table. And yet, despite my familiarity with its parts, the shop as a whole still managed to impress. Seeing all that machinery and specialized equipment dedicated to the art of print can kindle an urge to create in just about anyone.

No Detroit event is complete without Robocop™

Salt & Cedar: The neighborhood’s other first-rate letterpress studio, Salt & Cedar, decided to do something a bit different for Eastern Market After Dark. In addition to setting out their work and letting people roam about their workspace they also collaborated with a design collective called 1/X to bring us an unusually egalitarian attempt at characterizing the Motor City. The project is called Anecdoted City: Detroit and is based on the idea of people bringing in objects that, for whatever reason, signify Detroit to them. Because the objects aren’t required to have any sort of objective connection to the city the result is an exhibition that is as much a reflection of the people and how they relate to the city as it is of Detroit itself. It was (on a small scale at least) an unusually visceral glimpse into the city’s collective psyche.

Hey look! People!

Frontera: For a place that technically doesn’t exist yet their food was awesome. On the first floor visitors were presented with an incredibly appetizing assortment of breads, cheeses, and even a roasted pig. Off to one side was a sort of glazed prosciutto dish called a ‘Honeycomb Lantern.’ The presentation is hard to describe but it basically looked like somebody’s science fair volcano gone deliciously awry. Above it is was a lantern with honeycomb in it (hence the name) that dribbled honey onto the aged prosciutto. On the second floor people got to wander from room to room sampling baked goods that had been laid out with such artistic flair that in a couple of cases I sort of felt bad for disturbing it. Not that it stopped me of course, that stuff was incredible.

The fact that I had no idea what was going on didn't make it any less delicious.

Eastern Market After Dark was definitely a great addition to this year’s Detroit Design Festival. The event was a lot of fun and introduced me to a surprisingly robust creative community that I hadn’t even known was there. It also convinced me to start visiting the Eastern Market more often. Especially once Frontera opens it doors. Mmmm.