Design is looking for new ways to come together, after the design weeks

Almost a century after the first CIAM – the gathering of Modern Movement architects and designers held in La Sarraz in 1928 – and after decades of meetings and congresses, some decisive, others less so, how does design come together today? How does it create moments of productive friction capable of leaving a mark, especially in times that move and shift unpredictably? It is a condition we are gradually learning to read, from the transformations of global epicentres such as Milan Design Week to the rise of new events that now sit alongside the calendars of art and fashion, as is happening in Paris.

The Global Design Forum was born as an part of the London Design Festival and now carries a fifteen-year history. In 2026, it began to detach itself from its familiar London–V&A axis and started to migrate.

The first stop is Istanbul. The city has always functioned as an interface; today it is positioning itself within the new geographies, and above all the new timelines, that are reshaping design culture. And when it comes to timelines, Istanbul has much to say: “a dense, fast-growing city, a city of great kind of historical importance and heritage”, as Ben Evans, co-founder and director of the Festival, described it. It sits at the centre of an economy where designers and makers are still deeply connected, while other parts of the world are increasingly shifting towards service production.

The temptation to read a catalyst like this Forum through the lens of the congresses that came before it is hard to resist, yet perhaps that is also the best way to measure how much has actually changed.

The first shift in scale is the venue itself: the atrium of Hagia Irene, the Byzantine structure later absorbed into the Topkapı Palace complex, the heart of the Ottoman capital. It is an in-between space, open to the sky yet wrapped in a membrane of red tulle that transforms it into the Red Room, the Forum’s core. Beatrice Galilee, the Forum’s Content Advisor, shaped the theme “Worlds in Contact” precisely as “how design responds when material, political and bodily worlds collide”, and the Red Room becomes its spatial translation.  

A container not only physical but conceptual, it works through materiality itself, triggering a singular visual condition. The vaulted side spaces, marked by columns and hovering somewhere between service units and salles des pas perdus, reveal the Room through the translucent fabric from multiple heights and perspectives. The Forum is able to watch itself happening. It is a spatial condition, but also a fundamental one, as it embodies the relationships and networks that have always animated gatherings of this kind.

Lesley Lokko

Then, inevitably, come the contents, curated by Galilee within the artistic direction of Melek Zeynep Bulut, founder of the creative platform People Places Ideas. From early morning, first day, the programme unfolds through dense, brief and intense provocations that establish the tone of what follows, while giving shape to a second question: what does design say about itself?
If James Bridle feels both under attack by his own habitat and responsible for its condition, it is through working with materials that he reconnects with the world and with the possibility of caring for it. Thai architect Boonserm Premthada, meanwhile, contrasts nothing less than the slow force of the elephant – for which he designed a sanctuary – with the speed to which design now seems to have adapted. Beyond the different appeals to humanity, it is striking how much insight into the human condition emerges through the non-human. Something similar happens in the discussions around materiality, which Lina Ghotmeh explored together with Tom Dixon as a physical connection that still allows access to the act of designing itself, even in the age of artificial intelligence.

The messages emerging from the Red Room are “destabilising” in the most productive sense. They bring to the table the power of movement and migration, as narrated by an iconic figure such as Hussein Chalayan, while reopening the very idea of movement at a moment when renewed attention to the local risks hardening into localism and immobility. These are all invitations to a “constructive destabilisation”, an exercise in critical thought capable of unlocking cognitive deadlocks and enabling genuine innovation. Lesley Lokko recalls that, at a time when she questioned her own legitimacy as a designer, Zaha Hadid told her: “You have all this anxiety about not being an architect. You just have this knowledge to think around a thing: you’re an architect, shut up, get over yourself!”

It is another invitation to deconstruct the discipline itself, close to the unlearning described by Premthada. “When I left architecture school after 17 years,” Lokko says, “I was so grateful to know so little”, while still possessing “such a vast set of skills and tools.” It is a shift in perspective akin to the one emerging from the practice of Ma Yansong – founder of MAD and Domus Guest Editor for 2026 – in redefining the relationship between design and the nature that precedes it.

Where there is practice, there is relationship. At conferences, the moment “we should” and “we must” begin to dominate, one senses how little may actually follow. In Istanbul, by contrast, design speaks mostly in the indicative mood and rarely in the conditional. There are practices, stories and critical accounts of cultural work developed over years, such as Limbo Accra – first published in Domus – represented here by its founder Dominique Petit-Frère. There are initiatives that have pushed design and cultural production beyond conventional territories – “The Museum Has Left the Building”, as one panel declared – whether discussing glassmaking in Palestine, discussed by Samer Yamani, Serap Ekizler Sönmez and Selva Gürdoğanor, or the design of food ecosystems orbiting buffalo farming, investigated by Cooking Sections.

This gathering, which acts even as it speaks, ultimately raises one last question: what does design leave behind? What remains after it has passed through?
The answer immediately requires reframing: this was never simply a passing through. It leaves behind a legacy built on the four pillars that director Bulut identified in conversation with Domus: the form itself of the forum, placemaking, storytelling and rethinking. First of all, it leaves some more threads woven into a global network that also absorbs the local communities of students and creatives involved in the process. It leaves behind – for as long as possible, as the designers hope – installations that engage directly with the heritage that formed the backbone of the encounter. It also generates Istanbullar, a digital archive mapping Istanbul’s creative and human geography, connecting the world to every layer of its contemporary culture. And it creates public space intended to endure, with the forthcoming Yedikule Fortress Garden Competition.

The next stop for the Global Design Forum could be Shenzhen, Evans suggested, China’s technological capital: another intense context with which to engage, architecturally and spatially as much as culturally. It will be interesting to see how this new way for design to gather, grounded in storytelling, criticism and making, responds there. What’s next? Bulut has an idea: “Maybe designing habits again”.