✦ Overview

The Los Angeles Design Festival (LADF) returns from June 26–29, 2025, activating the city’s creative spirit through its biennial celebration of design, innovation, and cultural exchange. As the only multidisciplinary citywide design festival in Los Angeles, LADF transforms neighborhoods from Pasadena to Long Beach into vibrant hubs of exploration and imagination.

This year’s edition is themed “Design Futurism,” a concept-driven, solution-oriented approach that positions design not just as a response to the future, but as a tool to create it. The festival invites Angelenos and global visitors to explore how instinctive creativity can reshape everything—from systems and spaces to our shared human experience.

✦ Why You Should Attend

• Shape the Future: LADF is where radical thinkers, designers, and communities converge to explore how design solves today’s—and tomorrow’s—most urgent problems.

• Fully Immersive: The city itself becomes the venue, with programming taking place across galleries, rooftops, studios, and sidewalks.

• Cross-Disciplinary Exchange: From architecture to fashion, tech to food design, the festival thrives on collaboration across creative disciplines.

• Dynamic Tracks: Programming is centered around four bold content tracks:

  • L.A. Forever – Focuses on the city’s resilience through design post-crisis, curated with Frances Anderton.

  • Revenge of Analog – Celebrates hands-on, tactile creativity in a digital-first world.

  • The Ancestors Have Answers – Elevates Indigenous and ancestral design philosophies.

  • We Can See the Future – Explores speculative design and system transformation with Radha Mistry & Ronni Kim.

✦ Key Highlights

✦ Admission

Most LADF events are free and open to the public, while select sessions may require advance registration or tickets. Stay tuned to LADF’s official channels for updates.

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

What makes Los Angeles Design Festival 2025 stand out is not just its ambitious theme of “Design Futurism” but its courage in framing design as a humanist tool for reshaping societal systems. The four-track curation pushes beyond aesthetic experimentation and dares to explore systemic change—especially the “The Ancestors Have Answers” track, which brings Indigenous knowledge into the design future.

We especially recommend it to professionals exploring the intersections of design, justice, and collective memory. This is not merely a showcase—LADF is where speculative design becomes actionable, social, and communal.

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