Ways Forward

Founded by RE/CRAFT, Ways Forward received hundreds of submissions from creators worldwide, featuring works across material experimentation, craft, graphic and visual arts, painting and illustration, product design, architecture, landscape，Interiors，UI/UX, sculpture, and installation. International artists, designers, and industry experts—including Zoya Taseva, Elizabeth Glazko, Xinyue (Hope) Shen, Yanwen Hang, Marta Ornelas Monteiro , Sahasa,—were invited to serve on the jury. Selected outstanding works are exhibited at the London Design Festival (LDF). Ways Forward brings together international designers and artists from diverse regions and cultural backgrounds, exploring how different perspectives, practices, and creative approaches can open new ways forward. Rather than proposing a single vision of what the future should look like, the exhibition presents multiple ways of moving toward what comes next. Ways Forward brings together diverse creative practices that question established ways of thinking, making, and engaging with the world. Through art, design, and interdisciplinary approaches, the exhibition examines how creativity can generate new perspectives, connections, and pathways forward. Our international judges selected the outstanding works of art and design that best represent the theme. For some practitioners, the way forward may emerge through material experimentation: transforming waste into resources, developing new material languages, or challenging conventional processes of production. For others, it may be found through technology and new systems of making, using digital tools not simply to increase efficiency, but to expand what can be imagined and produced. Others may turn toward local knowledge, cultural memory, and traditional practices, recognizing that innovation does not always require abandoning the past. The selected designers /artists are: Yuwei (Momo) Liu, Zefeng Lu, Han Liu, Lucille Huang and others. By bringing together different disciplines, perspectives, materials, and cultural contexts, the exhibition creates a space for dialogue rather than a definitive answer. The diversity of practices becomes part of the proposition itself: that there is no single way forward, and that meaningful change can emerge through different perspectives, practices, and ways of thinking.