When does design mediate space and architecture?

How do objects, models and material experiments shape thought and value?

Can making become a form of research and storytelling?

Design–Architecture Forum brings together architects, designers, makers and thinkers in a five-day celebration, masterclass and learning experience exploring how objects and material experiments carry deep spatial meaning. Through showcases, talks and discussions, participants examine the space where design and architecture intersect to enrich our experience of the built world.

Set within the AA’s historic rooms and joined by an international community, the Forum creates a rare environment for experimental thinking and exchange. We will engage with objects, models, installations and crafted experiments to explore the functional, the aesthetic, the theoretical, the commercial and the architectural. You will learn directly from leading global voices in this small-cohort, high-impact space. Gathering around one large round table, you will have the chance to question, share and test ideas together.

This Forum is for designers, architects, artists, makers, educators and students exploring the relationship between making and meaning; studios using design as a mode of research or communication; practitioners developing material, craft and conceptual methods that translate architectural ideas into tangible form.

Recent contributors across the Forums include OK-RM, Matteo Mastrandrea, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, Lars Müller, Deyan Sudjic, Vicky Richardson, Tom Ravenscroft (Dezeen), Eliot Haworth and others.

The full 2026 programme details will be launched early 2026.