Held at the V&A South Kensington during the London Design Festival, the Global Design Forum 2025 unfolded less like a conference and much akin to a living exchange. Guest curated by Samta Nadeem, curatorial director at STIR, the three-day talks programme, under London Design Festival, brought together designers, architects, educators and thinkers with STIR as partner to explore this year’s theme, Design At/From The Seams. Across disciplines and formats, the Forum sought not conclusions but crossings—moments where ideas, materials and people met and pondered upon what multifarious meanings design might hold today.

Under the unifying theme of Day 1—Cognitive Frontiers—the opening conversation, ‘Synthesising Synapses’, set the tone for the Forum’s exploration of design as a connective language between creativity, technology and ethics. Chaired by Nadeem, the panel brought together Leo Warner, Founder of 59 Productions; Cher Potter, Director at the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts; Freya Salway, Creative Lead at Google Arts & Culture; and Amit Gupta, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, STIR. Together, they considered how collaboration across human and machine intelligence might build bridges rather than barriers. Salway noted that without design, technology risks losing its human connection; design keeps innovation grounded in empathy and ensures that technology serves people, as opposed to the other way around. The group agreed that design today must move beyond aesthetics to become a language of trust, one capable of holding empathy and ethics within fast-moving systems of change.

The next session, ‘In Dialogue: Worldbuilding and the Built World’, brought multidisciplinary artist and poet LionHeart together with academic, curator and editor Shumi Bose. The two alternated between verse and prose to explore the emotional life of design. LionHeart described architecture as “a navigational system of survival”, reminding the audience that “even finished pieces of architecture are works in progress.” Bose argued that optimism in design cannot be reasoned into existence but must be chosen: “Hope is an act of faith,” she said. “If we were looking for logical reasons to find hope, it would be pretty hard-pressed.” Their dialogue reframed design as a negotiation between the individual and the collective, between what is built and what remains possible.

Supported by Session Partner Sony, ‘Creating the Future - Insights from Sony Design’ saw Alexander Sjöstedt, Senior Design Manager and Art Director and Rikke Gertsen Constein, CMF Art Director from Sony Design Centre Europe, explore how foresight and empathy guide the development of new technologies. They described how speculative thinking and iterative making shape Sony’s design process, balancing imagination with real-world function. “Our purpose has stayed the same; to fill the world with emotion through the power of creativity and technology”, Sjöstedt said, underscoring how the studio’s vision connects creative experimentation with tangible human impact.

Echoing this spirit, the ADFF × STIR Curtain Raiser marked the forthcoming arrival of the Architecture and Design Film Festival in London. Kyle Bergman, the festival’s founder, joined Gupta and Ben Evans, Director of the London Design Festival, to discuss film as a bridge—across mediums, professionals and audiences. “The idea of the Architecture and Design Film Festival is to bring together both design professionals and the general public who are interested in architecture and design and show films that have both a design story and a human story,” Bergman said. Gupta added to the introduction by pressing on the effectiveness of cinema as a medium, especially in a country like India, questioning, “how do we make cinema not just a one-way process of consuming content?” The session closed with a screening of Green Over Gray: Emilio Ambasz, directed by Francesca Molteni (MUSE Factory of Projects) and Mattia Colombo, followed by a dialogue between Molteni and Bergman reflecting on Ambasz’s legacy and his vision of an architecture that folds the human and natural worlds into coexistence.

Day two—themed under Speculative Certainties and supported by Programme Partner Lotus—turned toward questions of material, memory and the evolving ethics of practice. In ‘Future Legacies’, moderated by Anmol Ahuja, Features Editor at STIR, the discussion between Kay Watson, Head of Arts Technologies at the Serpentine; Gareth Rees, Lead Strategic Designer at Lotus; and Nigel Cottier, Design Director at Accept & Proceed, asked what it means to leave a legacy in an age shaped by data and digital cultures. Watson explained the Serpentine’s decision to move her division's nomenclature from “digital” to “arts technologies” as a way to anchor the intangible in the social and material. “Legacy, for us, is about what role culture plays in how technologies develop,” she said. Rees described Lotus’s challenge of translating its racing heritage into the digital era: “We have to respect where we come from, but represent that legacy differently to make it relevant to the future.” The session reframed legacy as an evolving process that is participatory and ethical rather than monumental.

‘Natural Cultures’ brought together Caroline Till of FranklinTill, Guan Lee of Grymsdyke Farm, Seetal Solanki, Founder of Ma-tt-er, and Marie-Camille Lecoq, Head of CMF and Sustainability at Lotus, chaired by design writer and curator Riya Patel. Together, they explored how material intelligence and ecological awareness are reshaping design practice. The panel reflected on the tensions between sustainability, survival and systemic change and how creative work must adapt in an era when both resources and opportunities feel fragile. Till challenged the complacency of the design industry’s incremental responses to material and climate crisis, saying, “ I would say that it’s actually idealistic to think that we can carry on as business as usual. To not be shooting for regeneration is idealistic”. Solanki added that renewal also means restoring space for experimentation, “There was a period where we were able to play and I think that has been lost. Design education has been whittled down to a year to play, but you don’t really play. You are given a series of briefs and there is no room to understand who you are through that process”.

‘Analogue Memories', moderated by Annie Warburton of the Goldsmiths’ Company, brought together Ben Payne, Vice President of Design at Lotus; lighting designer Lee Broom; Rana Haddad, Co-Founder of 200Grs and product designer Andu Masebo. Each reflected on touch, materiality and emotion in an increasingly digital world. Payne described clay modelling as essential to design feeling, while Broom added, “If you can’t instil emotion in the inception of an idea, how can you evoke [it] when somebody puts a lamp in their home?” Haddad, recalling her experiences in the aftermath of the Beirut explosion, said, “Materiality itself holds the memory and it is itself the weapon that has torn many lives and so many eyes. Ironically, the spectacles are about glass and we depend on them to see better. Somehow, there’s a full loop. Materiality does have a lot to say and the relationship between what it gives and how you see differently when the eyeglasses are taken away from their context is striking”. The session asked how design might hold space for grief and renewal as forms of making.

The Forum’s final day expanded toward the civic and sensory scales of design, clubbed under (In)finite Realities. In ‘Rebordering from the Centre’, moderated by writer and editor Debika Ray; Torange Khonsari, Founder of Public Works, Marta Foresti, Founder of LAGO Collective, designer Tom Lloyd of PearsonLloyd and James Lee, Director of Access and Inclusion at the Research and Urban Design Practice, Publica, examined London’s identity as a global design capital. Foresti argued that belonging must move beyond tolerance: “The answer to othering cannot be ‘you’re welcome’. The answer has to be ‘it’s us; all of us, right, it's whoever works in the street”. The panel reframed design as civic practice and a means to imagine shared futures across difference and change.

Supported by L-Acoustics, ‘Beyond Silence’ followed Architect Paul Bavister, Project Director at Flanagan Lawrence and an Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL, joined by lighting designer Kristian Krogh of Lighting Design Collective and composer and sound designer Andrew Beaton, moderated by Elizabeth Dellert, Director of Strategy & Development, London Design Festival, to explore how sound and light shape human experience. Bavister described architecture as “a sensory navigation through a sequence of spaces that start to create us as human beings. Sound is deeply forgotten”, while Krogh noted, “We needed to understand that there have to be spaces that excite people, but there also have to be spaces that everyone can feel comfortable”. What began as a technical discussion became an appeal for empathy in design; a reminder that environments shape wellbeing as much as aesthetics.

Closing in on material care, ‘Exploring Transformative Practices in the Built Environment’ brought together makers and activists, including Freya Bruce of Recollective, Simon Lovatt of Calch a Chlai Cymru, Prashant Patel of Rescued Clay and Anna Parker of Intervention Architecture, whose collaborative work in community-led construction projects reimagines the relationship between material, labour and care. They described practices rooted in generosity, shared learning and redistributing resources in the built environment. As Bruce reflected in the conversation—chaired by artist, researcher, and cultural organiser Roo Dhissou—progress begins not with scale but with participation: “The joy comes in knowing that you’re shoulder to shoulder with other people in the community who are doing similar work in and around the UK in different parts, and what you learn from each other and knowing that there are people trying to push the same agenda”.

Finally, ‘Addressing urgent issues through art, design and museum practices’, a V&A x LDF roundtable discussion between curators Carrie Chan and Kristian Volsing of the V&A and featuring Artist Alicja Patanowska along with Daria Jelonek and Perry-James Sugden from Studio Above&Below, three of this year’s V&A cohort, focused on their installations Ripple Effect and (S)low Tech AI, examining how museums can move from neutrality to active participation in times of rampant ecological and social change. Patanowska described craft as a call to agency, saying that it carries a message in its very DNA to do things with our own hands, without waiting for institutions to act. The conversation echoed through the V&A’s galleries as an appeal for slower, more tactile engagement where reflection, material awareness and care become design’s most urgent forms of action.

Across its three days, the Global Design Forum resisted simplification. Whether through poetry or performance, film or fabrication, data or dialogue, it revealed design’s porous edges where it touches culture, politics, as well as the senses. The ‘seams’ then invoked by its theme were not faults to conceal but sites of connection: places of friction, contradiction and collaboration. At its best, the Forum made interdisciplinary feel less like a slogan and more like a practice—a reminder that meaningful design happens not in isolation, but in the in-betweens.