Design
Ten years after the first one, the conference returns to the campus it started on. Two days on a discipline that spent decades refining itself, and what artificial intelligence and a warming planet now demand it become.
Design refined itself.
Then the ground moved
Design has spent decades refining itself as a discipline: methods, standards, research practice, a shared language for the work. That refinement is real and it is what the field stands on. But refining assumes the conditions hold, and they no longer do. Artificial intelligence is rewriting the process itself. Climate change is forcing a reckoning with what design puts into the world. Redefining is what comes after refining, and it is no longer optional.
Generation is cheap now. The parts of the process that took weeks take minutes, and the parts that took judgment still take judgment. What the designer is actually for has to be answered again, out loud.
Every interface runs on energy and every product ends up somewhere. Designing for the planet is no longer a specialism at the edge of the field; it is a constraint on the whole of it.
The discipline refined itself around a narrow set of users, industries and markets. Redefining means asking who was never in that frame, and building for the majority rather than the market.
Two days
Parallel workshops and clinics. Smaller rooms, real briefs, and the sessions past attendees consistently rate highest.
Talks from practitioners, researchers and the people building design capacity inside Pakistani organisations.
Ten editions, no commercial owner
The conference has never belonged to a company. It runs because institutions lend rooms, companies write cheques, and organisations show up for nothing in return. The tenth edition is the largest yet, and the same is true of what it needs.
See who backed the last nine →Sponsorship keeps student attendance affordable and the programme free of a commercial owner. Tiers run from supporting a single workshop to headline partnership.
Host a track, run a workshop, bring your students, or carry the conference to a city it has not reached. Partnership is contribution, not a cheque.
The tenth is only possible
because of the other nine
It began in 2017 as a student-run event in a LUMS lecture hall, at a time when the country had no design conference at all. Every edition since is on the record.
Browse every edition →LUMS,
Lahore
The campus where the first edition was held in 2017, and where the research lab that started all of this still sits. Returning here for the tenth was not a logistical decision.
Be in the room
for the tenth
One mail when the programme lands and when attendance opens. Nothing else.