The Other Design, Imagining from Multiple Centres
What Design Can Do Mexico GNP 2026 is an invitation to imagine the world from other perspectives. In this seventh edition, we want to celebrate the significance of ideas that cross borders, transform upon encountering other cultures, and generate new ways of creating, collaborating, and building community.
We believe that creativity does not arise in isolation. It is born from the exchange between diverse people, territories, memories, and experiences. Today, many of the most interesting proposals in design, architecture, photography, music, academia, and contemporary creative practices appear precisely in those meeting spaces where different identities, languages, and ways of understanding the world coexist.
From Mexico’s unique position between the North and the South, this edition focuses on projects rooted in local contexts, yet capable of engaging in global dialogue. We want to recognize other ways of imagining the future. Ways of designing that stem from the collective, from care, from cultural diversity, from social justice, and from a closer relationship with the planet and with people.
We also understand migration as a powerful source of learning and innovation. Diasporas, displacements, and cultural intersections have given rise to new hybrid forms of thought and creation. The history of humanity is also the history of ideas traveling from one place to another, mixing, evolving, and opening up unexpected possibilities.
That is why What Design Can Do Mexico GNP 2026 brings together designers, architects, artists, photographers, musicians, researchers, students, collectives, and cultural agents who use creativity to respond to the great social and climate challenges of our time. People who understand that changing the world requires listening to other voices, building in community, and sharing knowledge.
More than a festival, we want to create a space for inspiration, conversation, and collaboration. A place where different disciplines and perspectives can meet to imagine more open, diverse, and sustainable futures.
Because the most powerful ideas are those that are shared. And because the future is better designed when we do it together.
The Other Design: Imagining and Transforming from the Local
We open the festival with a powerful conversation about creative practices that emerge from territories, communities and local histories. Designers, artists, and collectives from Ghana, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico share how design can serve as a tool for preserving knowledge, rebuilding identities, and responding to social and environmental challenges from other perspectives.
Through craft, upcycling, photography, technology, memory, and community-led practice, this block invites us to see design as a way to create projects that are more grounded, diverse, and collective.
Featuring: Yayra Agbofah, GT2P, Mi Valedor and Ecolana.
Imagining futures from different geographies
How do we imagine the future from such different cultural contexts? This act brings together voices from Mexico, Brazil, and Australia to reflect on the possible futures of design, cities, ancestrality, technology, and collective life.
From prospective research to speculative narratives and new social imaginaries, the conversations explore how different cultures face the fears, desires, and challenges of our time. A space to think about the future not as a single vision, but as many possibilities built from diverse contexts.
Featuring: Karla Paniagua, Sioduhi Waíkhᵾn, Jorge Camacho, Desireé Ibinarriaga, and a roundtable presented by Abierto de Diseño CDMX.
Designing across cultures, territories, and borders
The closing of the festival brings together creative practices intersected by migration, cultural exchange, and hybrid identities. Architects, photographers, researchers, and designers with backgrounds spanning Mexico, India, Morocco, Europe, and the United States share how design can connect different realities and open new conversations about community, territory, and belonging.
From architecture and imagery to research and social innovation, this act explores how migrant experiences transform our way of creating and understanding the contemporary world.
Featuring: Erich Martino, Santiago Arau, Tatiana Bilbao, Akanksha Deo Sharma, and Samir Bantal.
