Poised at the pulsating line that delineates binaries between humans and nature, theory and practice, the digital and the handmade, and bursting at the seams with creative verve, this year’s Global Design Forum at the London Design Festival examines conditions of interdependence, pluralities and multiplicities within design discourse. Emphasising diverse perspectives and distinctive worldviews, the programme planned for the upcoming design event around the theme Design At/From The Seams will unfold at the Victoria & Albert South Kensington, London, from September 13 – 15, 2025. This edition of GDF is guest curated by Samta Nadeem, Curatorial Director at STIR, and is also supported by Programme Partner Lotus and Session Partners Sony, L-Acoustics and ADFF:STIR.

Over the course of three days, leading voices from the global creative community will unpack the multiple worlds straddled by design, exploring key themes in architecture, technology, films and more. GDF will extend London Design Festival’s interrogation of the role of contemporary design in addressing crises (natural, manmade and technological) and the urgent issues of a seemingly burning world. Through critical dialogues, the event reveals and revels in intersectionalities.

The critical engagements are also highlighted by the V&A’s key installations for LDF this year, which offer responses to natural resource extraction, at-risk cultural heritage, geopolitical conflicts and the implications of AI for design. Eschewing the idea of a singular, or a paradigm for design, the forum shines a light on the radical interconnectedness and teeming assemblages that affect, drive and transform paradigms in and of our designed world.

The sessions will kick off with a crucial line of interrogation: how does design straddle interdisciplinarities? Speakers for the first panel, ‘Synthesising Synapses’, including Freya Salway, head of the lab at Google Arts & Culture; Amit Gupta, founder and editor-in-chief at STIR; Leo Warner, founder and director of production design company 59 Productions; Cher Potter, forecast editor at the Future Observatory, Design Museum, with Nadeem as moderator will deliberate on the question: If design is inferred as a solution to the world’s inequalities, how can it appropriately address complexities and break down conventional binaries between technology and craft or language and discourse? The second session of the first day will include an intimate dialogue, titled ‘Worldbuilding and the Built World’, between multi-disciplinary artist and poet Lionheart and educator and curator Shumi Bose. Unpacking the intrinsic relationship between the two—one imagined and the other inhabited—the pair will engage in a performative discourse, delivering a series of corresponding orations presented as a dialogue for the audience. The experimental format devised by STIR seeks to bridge people and discourse by bringing forth the many ways in which we negotiate space, both tangibly and intangibly. In an exclusive keynote titled Creating the Future - Insights from Sony Design, Alexander Sjöstedt, Senior Design Manager and Art Director and Rikke Gertsen Constein, CMF Art Director at Sony, will provide an exclusive peek into the processes that inform the brand.

The first day will conclude with the much-anticipated London launch of ADFF:STIR with a special curtain raiser. Presented in partnership with LDF and supported by the British Council with launch partners Molteni&C, Occhio, Solus Ceramics and Loco Design, the session will feature a screening of Green Over Gray: Emilio Ambasz. The architecture film, directed by Francesca Molteni and Mattia Colombo, offers a poignant reflection on the life and work of the Argentinian-American architect who has been called ‘the father, poet and prophet’ of ‘green architecture’ by Tadao Ando. The documentary—focused on the seemingly reticent Ambasz—features interviews, accounts and anecdotes from his closest apprentices, proteges, clients, contemporaries and vitally the occupants of the buildings he designed. The film illuminates Ambasz’s proposal of the built in tandem with the natural and not set against it—the green over the gray. The screening will be followed by a discussion between Molteni and Kyle Bergman, founder and director, ADFF New York.

The second day of programming is supported by GDF programme partner Lotus and will dwell on Speculative Certainties. The play between the apparent dichotomies highlighted in the theme will be expanded on through three insightful sessions focused on the digital, natural and analogue. The three sessions will crucially dissect the Future Legacies of the digital paradigm questioning how design can and inevitably must contend with an increasingly pervasive digital age. Further, they will look at what design culture can glean from Natural Cultures and if there is an alternative to making that emerges from the tension between innovation and a responsibility towards sustainability and ecological balance. And lastly, they will explore the tangible and intangible manifestations of design expressed by Analogue Memories, how it effectively and meaningfully manipulates materiality.

The first session, ‘Future Legacies’, will include Gareth Rees, lead strategic designer, LOTUS, Nigel Cottier, co-founder of Accept&Proceed and Kay Watson, head of arts technologies, Serpentine Galleries, in a session moderated by Anmol Ahuja, features editor at STIR. The second, ‘Natural Cultures’, will feature Caroline Till, co-founder of FranklinTill, London-based materials designer Seetal Solanki, founder of Grymsdyke Farm, Guan Lee and Marie Camille Lecoq, head of CMF and sustainability, LOTUS, in conversation with writer and curator Riya Patel. The last session for the day, ‘Analogue Memories’, will feature Ben Payne, vice president, LOTUS, product designer Andu Masebo, London-based designer Lee Broom and Rana Haddad, co-founder of design studio 200grs., in a discussion moderated by Annie Warburton, CEO of The Goldsmiths' Company.

The last day of the symposium will feature sessions by this year’s designers-in-residence for the V&A. The first session, ‘Re-bordering from the centre’, uses the event’s overall theme as a lens to explore the evolution of cities as creative hubs. Marta Foresti, founder of research collective LAGO and Torange Khonsari, founder of urban design practice Public Works, interior designer James Lee, and Tom Lloyd, co-founder of British design studio PearsonLloyd will engage in a discussion with writer and editor Debika Ray to begin unravelling the contested idea of the ‘centres’ of the creative and cultural landscape; contaminating the unadulterated idea of hubs such as London with notions of migration and collusion. In 'Beyond Silence: How the Unseen Shapes Place and Belonging', Kristian Krogh, partner and lighting design director at Lighting Design Collective, sound designer Andrew Beaton and Paul Bavister, project director, Flanagan Lawrence will delve into the ways sound can shape our experiences of space from immersive art installations to public environments and cultural venues. The session will be moderated by Elizabeth Dellert, head of development for LDF.

Exploring the ways in which design can dislodge established infrastructures and imagine regenerative futures, ‘Exploring Transformative Practices in the Built Environment’ will be moderated by V&A Emerging Designer Commission recipient Roo Dhissou and feature Freya Bruce, co-founder of ReCollective; Anna Parker of interdisciplinary studio Intervention Architecture; Simon Lovatt of Calch a Chlai Cymru and architect and ceramic artist Prashant Patel. The closing session of the symposium, ‘V&A x LDF: Addressing urgent issues through art, design and museum practices’, will be a round table discussion among artists Alicja Patanowska and Studio Above&Below, who have contributed to the V&A’s commissioned works at LDF this year, and V&A x LDF curators Carrie Chan and Kristian Volsing.

The sessions will present a pluralistic language in design that strives to bridge people, planet and pedagogy. By positioning plural perspectives at a thriving seam and unpacking the many worlds contemporary creative practices negotiate today, GDF 2025 hopes to imagine and foster possibilities of a world that is more accessible, inclusive and sustainable, and the acts of design that can support this.