Los Angeles, CA, June 05, 2025 - The Los Angeles Design Festival (LADF) returns June 26-29, 2025 with a citywide celebration of community, creativity, and inspiring design. This year’s theme, “Design Futurism,” is a solution-oriented exploration of human potential. When envisioning the future, design is inherently a part of our collective imagination: a tool for reimagining how we connect, create, and challenge existing narratives. This concept expands beyond the exploration of technological spectacle. This year, LADF invites all to explore Design Futurism through various lenses of our collective human experiences.
“Design has always been a language of possibility and problem solving,” says Erika Abrams, Executive Director of LADF. “Design Futurism isn’t sci-fi, spectacle, or robots – it’s about how we care for our cities, our neighbors, and ourselves. This year, we’re asking what it means to design with intention, imagination, and purpose, grounded in the belief that better is still possible in a future that belongs to all of us.
Founded in 2011, LADF is the only biennial, citywide, multidisciplinary design festival in Los Angeles. It activates cultural corridors from Pasadena to Long Beach and transforms spaces – sidewalks, studios, rooftops, galleries – into stages for bold new ideas. Through hands-on workshops, installations, keynotes, tours, and block parties, the festival blurs the boundary between maker and audience, platform and playground.
In 2025, LADF is organized around four content tracks:
L.A. Forever – co-curated with Frances Anderton, this track reimagines design in a city shaped by catastrophe and reinvention.
Revenge of Analog – celebrating slow, tactile creativity in a digitized world.
The Ancestors Have Answers – honoring Indigenous wisdom and ancestral knowledge as design imperatives.
We Can See the Future – co-curated with design futurists Radha Mistry and Ronni Kimm, this series explores how design can anticipate need and shape more just, resilient systems.
Festival Highlights:
Wednesday, June 25
LADF kicks off with a tandem awards gala spotlighting the creative forces shaping California’s design future.
The inaugural NeueHouse Design Awards celebrate innovation at the intersection of aesthetics and functionality, and are presented in partnership with Shinola, community design partner LA Design Festival, and media partner Cool Hunting. LADF Board Member and 2023 LADF EDGE Award Honoree Anne Dereaux of Dereaux Studio will be a part of a distinguished jury of 12 leading figures in art, architecture, and design. Open to both emerging and established designers, the awards reflect NeueHouse’s ethos of soulful, sustainable innovation grounded in California’s legacy of design excellence. Submissions close June 13, 2025. Link to apply: https://www.neuehouse.com/design-awards-25/
LADF will also present the 2025 LADF Design Awards, honoring individuals, studios, and collectives whose work exemplifies design as a tool for cultural vibrancy, resilience, and shared imagination. These awards spotlight creatives working across disciplines whose practices are rooted in equity, experimentation, and community impact.
Thursday, June 26
Programming focuses on emerging talent—students, recent grads, career changers, and self-taught designers. At ArtCenter in Pasadena, the L.A. Forever Hackathon convenes multidisciplinary teams for a four-day sprint to create a community toolkit offering equity-centered strategies for disaster response and resilience.
Friday, June 27
Citywide studio tours will take place throughout the afternoon, leading into three simultaneous LADF Block Parties hosted at Helms Design District, ROW DTLA, and Long Beach Design District.
Saturday-Sunday, June 28-29
Dive deep into Design Futurism on the final weekend of the festival. ROW DTLA presents a showcase of speculative design projects that ask how we might live, move, eat, and connect in worlds not yet realized. Simultaneously, in Culver City’s Helms Design District, the Southern California chapter of NOMA (National Organization of Minority Architects) hosts a powerful symposium on rebuilding Los Angeles as a part of the L.A. Forever track.
Additional event highlights include:
A look inside CSULB’s Immersive Design Research Lab, showcasing student and faculty explorations in spatial storytelling.
A speculative installation by Kevin Sherrod inside the historic Acres of Books building, rethinking food systems and community health.
A launch of Kevin Bethune’s new book, Nonlinear, at ROW DTLA. The author will also participate in the “We Have Seen the Future” track.
Throughout the weekend, studio tours invite the public into the creative heart of L.A.—from the Arts District to MacArthur Park and Long Beach. This year’s Design Dinner takes place at Chez Bacchas in Long Beach’s East Village, curated by designer and food influencer James Tir. The evening explores the intersection of food, form, and function—right down to the utensils.
Founded in 2011, the Los Angeles Design Festival is a nonprofit platform committed to making design accessible, inclusive, and catalytic. Whether it's product design or public space, storytelling or system thinking, LADF continues to affirm that design isn’t just a tool for making things, it’s a practice for shaping futures.
For the full 2025 program and ticket information, visit ladesignfestival.org.
Contact
LA Design Festival
Christine Joo
562-882-5648
ladesignfestival.org
