As the London Design Biennale returns to the Somerset House in its fifth edition, from June 5 – 29, 2025, it’s not just the visible spectacle of design installations and national pavilions that’s drawing attention or stimulating creative discourse. Running parallel is the Global Design Forum (GDF) at the King's College London, UK, a three-day series of talks and panel discussions featuring speakers such as the Biennale's artistic director Dr Samuel Ross MBE, economist Mariana Mazzucato and Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. This year, GDF turns the spotlight on Design and the Invisible, to reorient our gaze to the hidden networks and forces shaping the world we inhabit. Moreover, and more crucially, the forum will discuss how design can dismantle outdated systems and forge radical new ones, or why it’s even required.

The Global Design Forum, which will take place from June 10 – 12, 2025, draws from Ross's theme for the London Design Biennale titled, Surface Reflections. The platform promises to become a convergence of ideas, voices and provocations, inviting us to explore the hidden, the internal and the interconnected, with an underlying enquiry as stated: How can we dismantle outdated systems and forge radical new ones?

A press statement shared by the forum expands on the idea behind this edition. It says, “Beneath every object, building and space lies an entangled network of invisible forces – financial flows, digital networks, contested borders and unspoken cultural codes that shape lives and govern the world. At the London Design Biennale, we pull back the curtain on these unseen drivers of design… [GDF] will interrogate the friction between what we see and what we don’t, exploring the themes underpinning the pavilions and how they connect to the wider world. Over three days, leading designers, architects, economists, activists and technologists – drawn from the Biennale and beyond – will shine a light on the impulses that come from within us, those that lie outside us and those that connect us.”

It’s not about dismissing the visible—objects, buildings and spaces – but questioning what lies beneath them. – Debika Ray

For Debika Ray, interim programme director of the Global Design Forum, interrogating these unseen forces is a timely and urgent pursuit. “Design tends to largely focus on what’s visible – the material world all around us – and that’s bread and butter for most practising designers – but we’re living in a time of extraordinary complexity, and it’s often what we don’t see that affects us most deeply,” she tells STIR. “Our aim is to make the invisible visible – asking how design is affected by these forces and how it might reshape them in ways that benefit us all.”

Supported by STIR as a digital media partner, GDF promises to bring together a series of conversations that “challenge assumptions, amplify overlooked ideas and envisage a future where design’s transformative power is freed from invisible constraints.” A tripartite structure comprising Outer Forces, Power Lines and Inner Selves guides the Forum’s 2025 edition, each day probing a distinct sphere of influence.

Day 1: June 10, 2025

Outer Forces

Vanishing resources, shifting demographics and material realities – designers today operate against a backdrop of extraordinary external pressure. We confront these seemingly immovable forces, platforming innovators who are not just pushing the limits, but scaling and redefining them.

The opening panel, My Generation: Can design bridge the age gap?, will puts forth voices across generations: industrial designer and gerontologist Patricia Moore, Zak Agnew of the Design Museum youth board and Anne Wynne of DSDHA Architects. Chaired by curator and writer Priya Khanchandani, the session asks whether public spaces, digital platforms, workplaces, services and politics truly serve every age or merely reflect generational divides.

Further, in Scarcity and power: geopolitics of extraction, designer Mále Uribe Forés, artist Shiraz Bayjoo and researcher Bridget Storrie will delve into the shadow economies behind our devices and structures. Their discussion seeks to bring to light the ethical complexities of resource extraction, with an underlying inquiry, as the press release states, “Will scarcity always fuel conflict and inequality or can design transcend it?”

The day will end in a contemplative register, as REFLECTION, where Violinist Midori Komachi will perform Paper Clouds: Materiality in Empty Space, in a washi paper dress crafted for the Japan pavilion, promising to blur the line between art and object, presence and absence.

Closing Day 1 is Architectural Alchemy, a conversation between Kengo Kuma and Leonie Bell, director of V&A Dundee, which Kuma designed to reflect Scotland’s rugged coastal landscapes. Chaired by Will Gompertz, director of London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum and former arts editor of the BBC, they are set to dissect how architecture can become a vessel for cultural memory, revealing the dialogue between material and meaning, between buildings and those who use them.

Day 2: June 11, 2025

Power Lines

The complex web of infrastructure governs the flow of money, materials, products and people across the world. How can we harness these physical and abstract systems – overhaul laws, rethink relationships and redesign financial rules?

The curation for day 02 looks forward to delve into the infrastructures – visible and invisible – that shape flows of power and value. The first panel, Glass Walls: Can trust be designed into systems and spaces? will see designer and author Rachel Botsman, urbanist Nabil Al-Kinani and Kathy Peach, director and co-founder of the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design at Nesta, dissect the fragile foundations of trust in a world of digital atomisation. “How can we design systems, spaces and organisations that reinforce trust rather than erode it?” is the question posed for this panel, which is chaired by design innovator Rama Gheerawo.

Who owns ideas? Intellectual property in an age of AI pushes the conversation further. The session will be chaired by technology entrepreneur and creative leader Suhair Khan, and will have in attendance Christian Zimmermann, CEO of Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), Daljit Singh, head of brand at Exactly.ai and Agniezska Glowacka COO of Haptic Architects London, who shall debate the collision between human creativity and machine learning. They will delve into “whether copyright is a protectionist anachronism that is stifling collaboration or a lifeline for marginalised creators, and whether open-source frameworks can co-exist with fair compensation,” according to the release.

Culminating the day with the inquiry, 'Is design a luxury or a public good?', economist Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value – distinguished for redefining how governments measure value beyond GDP, will sit down with Gus Casely-Hayford, director of V&A East, in The value of design. They panelists will unpack how design transcends the market, and “how we should value design and how it can be deployed to transform society for the better.”

Day 3: June 12, 2025

Inner Selves

Design is a mirror for our deepest passions and instincts – reflecting our identities, cultures and communal ties. We make the intangible tangible – from cultural mythmaking to the soul of craft – asking how creative minds translate our inner worlds into tangible forms.

The final day seeks to turn inwards, towards the personal narratives and cultural threads that animate creativity. In Hand, heart and machine: craft in an age of automation (in partnership with the Goldsmiths’ Fair), voices such as designer and researcher Thomas Thwaites, Carole Collett, sustainable materials pioneer and professor in Design for Sustainable Futures at Central Saint Martins, Shai Akram, co-founder of design practice Studio Alt Shift and jewellery maker Steve Ali, will question what is lost – and what might be reclaimed – when machines replace hands. Their conversation, chaired by Annie Warburton, will probe into “how design can bridge the gap between craft and industry.”

Next up will be artist and anthropologist Liz Hingley’s brief REFLECTION, inviting guests to consider the SIM card as a quiet but potent symbol of connection and a tool for building relationships, through her initiative, The SIM Project.

Chaired by Samta Nadeem, curatorial director of STIR, Beyond Borders: Can design heal the rift between global and local? brings together Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja of the Nairobi-based group of architects Cave_Bureau, Amrita Mahindroo, co-founder of London-based Da Costa Mahindroo Architects and Jean-Michel Geridan, director of the National Centre for Graphic Design in France. The panel considers design as soft diplomacy – an instrument to weave new forms of belonging across contested spaces. As the Forum elaborates: “Amid tensions between globalisation and nationalism, there’s a need to foster common solutions to collective problems – so we bring together designers who are exploring new forms of belonging and collaboration.”

Finally, the Forum returns to LDB’s core theme with Surface Reflections, a conversation between Ross and Victoria Broackes, the Biennale director. In dialogue with journalist and Biennale jury member Charlene Prempeh, Ross will explore how the personal and political collide in the making of design – how every visible surface is a reflection of invisible histories, as Broackes will reflect on “how these ideas underpin the national pavilions exhibiting across the exhibition.”

For Ray, this year’s Forum is a call to action. “Talks are contained within a time and place,” she says, “but the conversations they instigate and the thoughts they spark have a life of their own, and that is what, cumulatively, creates wider social change.” She hopes that, in grappling with these invisible systems, audiences will be inspired to challenge and reimagine them, dismantling the status quo in ways both radical and real.

Below are excerpts from STIR’s extended interview with Ray:

STIR: The Biennale’s theme highlights the interplay between visible and invisible forms. How has this perspective shaped the curation of the Global Design Forum’s topics and the selection of speakers this year?

Debika Ray: The starting point was the Biennale’s theme as a whole… which explores how creative ideas are fuelled by both our internal experiences and external influences. The pavilions respond to that theme, so we have as well – exploring the hidden inner impulses, external influences and connecting forces that shape design.

Most of us only have a fractional understanding of, and control over, these invisible forces – whether the vastness of the digital world, the ways in which people and goods flow around the globe, how political decisions and laws are made or how the economy puts pressure on our daily lives. That mystery is, in my view, partly what’s causing the deep-seated political and social malaise we’re contending with today. We want these conversations to make the invisible visible – asking both how design is affected by these forces and what designers can do to reshape them, in a way that benefits us all. It’s not about dismissing the visible—objects, buildings and spaces – but questioning what lies beneath them.

The speakers are drawn from a variety of fields and disciplines – designers, architects, makers, urbanists and museum directors, but also people working in policy, academia, activism and technology – and as it’s a global event, they hail from around the world, including from the Biennale itself. Universal problems require universal solutions.

STIR: What particular outcomes or initiatives are you hoping to encourage through this year’s forum, especially regarding the 'dismantling of outdated systems'?

Debika: First, we hope it will inspire people to visit the Biennale and see the work of the national pavilions that explore many of these ideas in physical, tangible form. There are almost 40 pavilions across Somerset House, with themes ranging from how societies cope with death to how, in the future, we might grow our own building materials.

In terms of the forum itself: subjects like these are often gate-kept and dressed up in language that makes them inaccessible to most of us, but it’s vital for the functioning of a healthy society that we all understand how the systems shaping the economy, law, politics and infrastructure work, because that’s the only way to take control of them and change them when they’re unjust.

I hope people will go away feeling that we generated conversations that are enlightening but also engaging and entertaining, and that we’ve brought these subjects to life in a meaningful and tangible way, and not just in the abstract – through the insights of some brilliant creative minds. And I hope they are, then, inspired to do something with this information – that is, take on invisible systems and start dismantling the status quo, whatever form that might take.