Where Worlds Converge
Day One at Global Design Forum İstanbul
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The inaugural edition of Global Design Forum İstanbul has concluded, bringing four days of programming to a close and establishing the city as a significant meeting point for international design dialogue.
Presented in collaboration with People Places Ideas and under the artistic direction of Melek Zeynep Bulut, the Forum expanded Co-Founder and Chairman Ben Evans CBE’ flagship platform for global discourse to İstanbul for the first time, combining talks, performances, installations and digital storytelling across the city and within the Topkapı Palace complex.
"The Global Design Forum is designed to stimulate debate, dialogue and exchange. In İstanbul for the first time it offered new opportunities for exploration not simply through the prism of east and west but local and international, contemporary and historic, and crucially problems and solutions. I believe that design is everything as is İstanbul, a city of wonders. It was a triumph being here."
Ben Evans CBE, London Design Festival & Global Design Forum Co-Founder and Chairman
At the centre of the Forum’s public and editorial identity was the idea that İstanbul is not simply hosting design discourse but helping shape it.
"Global Design Forum İstanbul demonstrates how design can serve as a bridge between heritage and the future, local identity and international collaboration. As creative economies continue to shape the future of cities and cultural diplomacy worldwide, this forum reinforces İstanbul’s growing role as a global centre for culture, architecture and contemporary creative thinking."
Mr. Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Minister of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Türkiye
In addition, Bulut has described the Forum as a civic-scale platform designed to work through question, difference and site-specificity.
"Global Design Forum İstanbul has been a very special project that we have worked on with great care over many months, thoughtfully shaping its contextual framework, global positioning, and overall strategy. I’m incredibly happy to see the Forum come to life in such a strong and positive way. İstanbul is a city with a powerful cultural heritage, one that knows very clearly what it wants, and what it does not want. Seeing the city embrace the Forum with such strong interest has been truly inspiring. The discussions, exhibitions, and focal points we highlighted across the city were brought to life through a well-considered approach, and we are very happy to have created an inspiring platform for everyone involved."
Melek Zeynep Bulut, Founder of PPI & Global Design Forum İstanbul Artistic Director
Day One Highlights
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The first session, Worlds in Contact, brought together Fernando Laposse, Mireia Luzárraga, James Bridle, Boonserm Premthada and Defne Koz in a fast-moving series of exchanges that established the Forum’s central proposition; design as a practice that shares authorship with ecosystems, communities and living systems.
"We should diversify who we are designing for; not all humans are urban humans. I think design innovation should propose radically new production systems that are fair, collaborative and non-extractive." - Fernando Laposse
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One of the defining conversations of the Forum followed in Design of Our Time – Material Worlds. Moderated by Celâleddin Çelik, Tom Dixon CBE and Lina Ghotmeh reflected on architecture and design through radically different yet complementary perspectives.
Dixon traced four decades of designing through industrial and cultural transformation, while Ghotmeh articulated a deeply material and place-sensitive approach to architecture grounded in memory, sustainability and craft. Together, the conversation captured one of the Forum’s recurring concerns; how contemporary practice can remain human, tactile and historically conscious amid accelerating global change in the age of artificial intelligence.
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The programme repeatedly moved beyond conventional conference formats into performative and immersive territory. Architect and filmmaker Liam Young presented Planet City; a speculative cinematic work imagining every human being living within a single hyper-dense metropolis while the rest of the Earth is rewilded. Combining questions of migration, climate and resource distribution, the sensory experience was accompanied by a live performance from Forest Swords and exemplified the Forum’s commitment to experimentation across disciplines and media.
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Questions of institutional power, cultural authorship and public responsibility shaped several major discussions throughout the programme. In Designing Design Worlds, figures including Dominique Petit-Frère, Beatrice Leanza, Justine Simons OBE, Sheikha Reem Al-Thani and Ben Evans CBE examined how design is framed, circulated and legitimised across museums, biennales and cultural institutions, interrogating the structures that determine what enters the global cultural canon and what remains excluded.
"Worlds in Contact perfectly captures the critical role of design in shaping the spaces, rituals and narratives of collective life, and the growing need for moments like the Global Design Forum to make the encounter of resonant ideas and experiences possible." - Beatrice Leanza
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These questions continued in The Museum Has Left the Building, where Alper Derinboğaz, Beral Madra, Ömer Selçuk Baz, Guta Moura Guedes, Anastasia Sinitsyna and Banu Uçak challenged traditional institutional models and argued for museums rooted in ecology, participation and public space rather than monumentality or hierarchy. Across the discussion, the museum emerged not as a static container for culture, but as a social and environmental actor embedded within everyday life.
"İstanbul hosted a very significant forum which found an active and conscious audience in İstanbul. Important figures from five continents presented their thoughts, knowledge, experiences, and criticisms in the Topkapi Palace Complex, a venue that holds the deepest historical and cultural significance in İstanbul. The legacy of this event now presents an important opportunity for younger generations." - Beral Madra
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Day one concluded with a keynote town hall by Hussein Chalayan MBE, one of the most influential figures working across fashion, art and technology. In conversation with journalist Caroline Roux, Chalayan reflected on a practice built around migration, identity, displacement and transformation, discussing how clothing and the body can operate simultaneously as political, emotional and architectural. His keynote reinforced the Forum’s broader ambition to dissolve disciplinary boundaries and foreground design as a mode of critical inquiry.
