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Global Design Forum is a curated thought leadership programme, celebrating design and the minds shaping its future.
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Global Design Forum
GDF returns to London Design Festival in September 2025.
The last LDF edition took place at the V&A from 14 – 19 September 2024. The programme focussed on some of the most pressing and crucial challenges that designers currently face. Daily themes included Please Design Responsibly; The Healthy City; Resilience and Repair and More than Human.
Over 60 speakers from across the global design and creative community shared new perspectives on how design can be more accessible, inclusive and sustainable and at the forefront of change.
The talks took place in partnership with Johnnie Walker Blue Label, VELUX and Türkiye Design Council.
As part of the London Design Biennale programme, from 10 - 12 June 2025 the Global Design Forum hosted a series of talks and panel discussions at King's College London, under the title ‘Design and the Invisible’.
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How can we dismantle outdated systems and forge radical new ones? Over three days, Samuel Ross, Mariana Mazzucato, Kengo Kuma and dozens more of the world’s most exciting designers and thinkers came together for a series of talks to rethink the hidden powers shaping our world.
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.
Inspired by artistic director Samuel Ross’ Biennale theme, Surface Reflections, we pulled back the curtain on these unseen drivers of design. Leading designers, architects, economists, activists and technologists will shone a light on the impulses that come from within us, those that lie outside us and those that connect us, and envisage a future where design’s transformative power is freed from invisible constraints.
This edition was supported by our Digital Media Partner, STIR.
DESIGN AND THE INVISIBLE
10 June | DAY 1: OUTER FORCES
Design under external pressure. Vanishing resources, hardening borders, societies fractured by conflict and inequality – 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.
13:30 - 14:30 | My Generation: Can design bridge the age gap?
16:30 - 17:30 | Scarcity and power: the geopolitics of extraction
17:45 - 18.00 | REFLECTION
18:00 - 19:00 | Architectural Alchemy: Kengo Kuma and Leonie Bell in conversation with Will Gompertz
11 June | DAY 2: POWER LINES
Rewiring connective networks. 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 – rewire data flows, rethink labour practices, redesign financial rules and rebuild trust – to better serve our needs?
13:30 - 14:30 | Glass Walls: Can trust be designed?
16:30 - 17:30 | Who owns ideas? Intellectual property in an age of AI
18:00 - 19:00 | The value of design: Mariana Mazzucato in conversation with Gus Casely-Hayford
12 June | DAY 3: INNER SELVES
Unleashing inner impulses. Design is a mirror for our deepest passions, values and instincts – reflecting our identities, cultures and communal ties. We make the intangible tangible – from cultural myth-making to the soul of craft – interrogating how creative minds translate our inner worlds into tangible forms.
13:30 - 14:30 | Hand, heart and machine: craft in an age of automation
16:15 - 16:30 | REFLECTION
16:30 - 17:30 | Beyond Borders: Can design heal the rift between global and local?
18:00 - 19:00 | Surface Reflections: Samuel Ross and Victoria Broackes in conversation with Charlene Prempeh
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London Design Festival
13–21 September 2025
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