The design world is at work all around us at every point in our lives. It aids us, supports us, informs our decisions and when done well, it will always shape the future and the values we develop as we travel towards it. London is a marvel of design and has been for thousands of years, with influences from all over the world coalescing to create a capital city that strives to move forward in the right way.
The London Design Festival is a celebration promoting the city as the design capital of the world. This year, the 23rd edition takes place from the 13th to the 21st of September and promises to be the biggest and best version yet.
Creating The Blueprints for LDF
Sir John Sorrell is a world-renowned British designer who has been an advocate for creative education all the way through his career. Working with fellow designer and Royal College of Art graduate Ben Evans CBE, they initially had the idea to create an event that would build on the foundation of London’s thriving design scene to attract the greatest creative thinkers, practitioners and educators in the world. The first festival was a fantastic success with over 60 events in locations across the capital and almost 100 notable speakers. Buoyed by the initial reaction, the festival grew into a nine-day extravaganza that now takes pride of place as probably the most important set of dates in the design world calendar.
Influence & Impact
The last 23 years of LDF have produced some magnificent moments that have drawn the eyes of the world to London. One of the most iconic has to be the commissioned work of British artist and stage designer, Es Devlin, in 2018 as he took over Trafalgar Square with his landmark Please Feed The Lions project. A fifth lion made of red light was added to the iconic four lion statues that responded to public interaction to create AI-aided poetry. Feeding the lion words via a website or on-site interface produced entirely new verses that were then projected onto the National Gallery in real time. It was a triumph of collective content in a manner that democratised creativity and encouraged all to get involved. Technology & design had become a civic tool in one of the most recognisable locations on the planet.
The 2025 Program
This year, over 400 events are expected to be created, together with around 300 partners through workshops, installations, thought leadership talks & discussions, open studios and showroom activations. Here is a collection of what are anticipated to be particular highlights.
The Shape of Play
Sabine Finkenauer was trained at the Academy of Fine Arts and practices across multiple disciplines in collage, paint, tapestries and soft sculpture. The idea of The Shape of Play is to explore how simple and abstract shapes that often evoke children’s pictures can instantly spark joy and imagination. This is a collaboration with the London Womenswear brand L.F Markey and can be found on the Dalston to Stoke Newington trail during the festival schedule. Bright colours, bold ideas and a strong expressive sensory element should prove to be a hit with visiting families and those looking for an understanding of how design is driven by open thinking and play.
Disposable Music
This looks to be a fascinating project that investigates how the art of music is fast becoming a throwaway and disposable product in the modern age. As it increasingly becomes engineered for those fleeting and viral moments, does letting go of an art piece’s permanence mean it is liberated from previous frameworks, or does it lose the freedom of expression it has been afforded for so long? The exhibition takes place inside a working coffee shop, Simmos, in Hackney Wick, to reinforce the idea of music as a backdrop and not the main event. Without taking sides, it offers a moment of reflection for the future of music and our developing receipt of it.
Find Your Voice Through Design
Find Your Voice Through Design will be a live studio environment where creativity is posited as power for young people to shape the future. Created by ONELAB college and taking place at their campus in Corsican Square, this is an immersive experience and living invitation into a new kind of learning. Led by a collective made up from designers and graduates of the UK’s finest universities, it deals with industrial design, digital media, communication, illustration and fashion to witness an entirely new educational model in action. It holds a strategy with a purpose based on the transformative power of design and wants young people to access it directly to see the changes they can make.
Mark Your Calendar
London in September will be a fantastic place to be. With so many of the great and good from the design and creative worlds flocking here to become a part of the festival, there will be a very special energy that is simple to get involved with for any residents or visitors. This special city is the perfect place to support it through the distinct spaces, neighbourhoods, locations and attractions that will be acting as the stage for it all.
