Raising the Bar: What Design Event Organisers Can Actually Do
The critique of design festival culture is not a call for austerity or exclusion. It is an argument for intentionality. Festival organisers are, whether they acknowledge it or not, curators of disciplinary discourse. That is a consequential role, and it comes with obligations that go beyond producing a compelling program. The good news is that raising the standard of discourse at non-academic design events does not require turning them into conferences. It requires a set of deliberate structural choices about how speakers are selected, how proposals are evaluated, how presentations are framed, and how the event positions itself in relation to the profession’s broader knowledge ecosystem.
Introduce a selection process with explicit intellectual criteria
The most consequential single change an organiser can make is to replace invitation-by-reputation or submission-by-enthusiasm with a structured selection process that evaluates proposals against stated intellectual criteria. This means assembling a program committee, drawn from senior practitioners, educators, critics, and researchers, that evaluates submissions on grounds beyond novelty and speaker profile. The criteria should be explicit and published: Does this proposal advance a clearly articulated argument or question, rather than simply describing a body of work? Is it situated within a broader historical, disciplinary, or social context the speaker demonstrably understands? Does it reference prior thinking, from design or adjacent fields? Does it offer something the audience can examine, dispute, or build upon? Publishing these criteria serves a double function: it signals to prospective speakers what is expected, and it signals to attendees what kind of event they are entering.
Require written proposals of substance
Most festival submissions amount to a title, a 100-word description, and a speaker biography, which is insufficient to evaluate intellectual quality and places the entire burden of assessment on the organiser’s intuition about the speaker’s reputation. A more demanding process would require a 600 to 1000-word proposal articulating the central argument, identifying the key references that have shaped the thinking, acknowledging what is original or contested about the position being advanced, and describing what the audience will take away as a usable idea. Any speaker who has genuinely thought carefully about their subject should be able to write this without difficulty. The inability to do so is itself diagnostic.
Distinguish between formats and protect the ones that demand rigour
Not everything at a design event needs to meet the same intellectual standard. Exhibitions, project showcases, and social gatherings have legitimate value, provided they are clearly labelled as such and do not crowd out the formats where serious discourse is expected. The problem arises when portfolio showcases are programmed as though they were lectures, and panel discussions treated as equivalent to argued presentations. Organisers should be explicit about what each format is designed to produce. A lecture should be held to the standard of a sustained argument. A showcase is a showcase. This transparency allows audiences to calibrate their expectations and creates protected space within the program for more demanding formats to exist without being diluted by adjacency to lighter content.
Invest in speaker development
Selection is only the beginning. Many design practitioners have genuinely important things to say but have never been taught to construct an argument, situate their thinking historically, or present ideas with intellectual precision, because the profession has never asked this of them. Organisers serious about discourse quality should invest in a light editorial process: a briefing document that explains the intellectual expectations of the event, and one or two conversations with a program advisor who can help the speaker sharpen their argument and identify gaps in their framing. This is not about imposing academic convention or homogenising voices. It is about helping practitioners translate valuable experience and insight into a form the professional community can actually learn from. The best editors do not change what a writer thinks; they help writers say more precisely what they already mean.
Build in structured critical response
The formal respondent, or discussant, a practice common in academic conferences but almost entirely absent from design events, is one of the most effective mechanisms for maintaining discourse quality. A designated respondent, briefed in advance on the speaker’s argument, offers structured critical engagement: identifying what is strong, where the evidence is thin, what counter arguments have not been addressed, and what questions the presentation opens up. This transforms a presentation from a broadcast into a genuine intellectual exchange, and models for the audience what critical engagement with ideas actually looks like. The respondent need not be adversarial; the goal is not to embarrass the speaker but to demonstrate that ideas presented in professional forums are subject to scrutiny, which is a sign of respect for the thinking, not an attack on it. Speakers prepare more carefully when they know their argument will be examined.
Create a public record of the discourse
Festivals are ephemeral by nature, and ephemeral events leave no knowledge residue. A talk given to hundred people, never documented, contributes nothing cumulative to the profession’s intellectual life regardless of its quality. Organisers should commit to publishing edited transcripts or written versions of key talks, with the speaker’s references included, on an open platform. This creates a record that can be cited, disputed, and built upon, and it creates accountability. A speaker whose claims are visible in writing has more reason to ensure those claims are defensible. Over time, this body of published discourse becomes a resource the profession can actually draw on.
Take editorial positions and defend them
The most intellectually serious events are organised around a genuine curatorial argument: a thesis about where the discipline is and what it needs to examine, sharp enough to exclude some things, which means sharp enough to mean something. Organisers should be willing to say clearly what their event is not: not a showcase for the year’s most aesthetically successful work, not a platform for agency self-promotion, not a networking event with talks attached. This editorial courage will disappoint some speakers and sponsors. It will also produce discourse that gives attendees something to argue about on the way home, the surest sign that genuine thinking has taken place.
None of these measures requires a design festival to become an academic symposium. They require only that the people responsible for shaping professional discourse decide that the discourse matters, that what happens on their stages has consequences for how the profession thinks about itself, how young designers understand their responsibilities, and how seriously the wider world takes design.