About Convenings
Where Design Leadership Confronts What Comes Next.
We do not organize conferences. We curate convenings of consequence.
For thirty years, the Design Futures Council has gathered the leaders who shape the future of design, not to celebrate our achievements, but to confront our impact. Our convenings exist at the intersection of conviction and consequence, where the decisions we make today determine the world we’ll design tomorrow.
Why We Convene
A Design Futures Council convening brings together authentic leaders: firm heads, practitioners, investors, educators, and social influencers in mixed rooms to face what most only acknowledge. We put the salient themes on the table and stay with them: technology and applied innovation, environmental responsibility, future of talent, design education, the business of design.
These gatherings are off the record and built for candor. Direct peer dialogue, not staged performance. Collaboration over competition.
We alter the thinking so that we step back to re-engage more responsibly and intentionally to the themes that impact our businesses and institutions. Our accomplishment is influence.
The aim is simple: move from busy activity to decisive action. Our convenings slow the noise long enough for leaders to see the system, name the trade-offs, and commit to choices that matter.
Upcoming ConveningsThe Leadership Summit: Our Flagship Convening
Each year, we convene in-person Leadership Summits across key regions. This is our most comprehensive gathering of design leadership across industries.
What to Expect:
Thought Leadership That Centers First-Order Questions
Presentations that cut through noise to address what actually matters. We prioritize strategic clarity from design leaders who’ve earned the right to speak.
Design Leadership Case Work
Organizations putting strategy into practice. Not the polished case study version. The messy reality of vision meeting operations, complete with failures that taught and pivots that worked. From architecture firms to product teams, from service design consultancies to in-house creative departments.
Cross-Industry Dialogue
Conversations with investors, educators, technologists, and policy makers who see design from angles we often miss with exchanges that reshape perspective.
Working Sessions
Small groups. Real decisions. Leaders bring challenges they’re facing now. Peers ask hard questions and offer perspective your team cannot.
Other Convenings
Think Tanks
Every year, intimate peer groups meet face-to-face in select global cities to work through the challenges that matter most: AI’s impact on design practice, the talent crisis across creative industries, and sustainable design that moves beyond compliance to consequence.
Structured dialogue. Working sessions. Small groups. You leave with frameworks, perspective, and relationships with peers facing identical challenges who become informal advisors.
View Upcoming Think TanksWebinars/Webcasts
Ideas, themes, and intelligence shared online for our patron community through virtual gatherings. Between in-person convenings, we share pre-record sessions that feature evidence, implications, and the practical moves leaders are making now.
We deliver findings grounded in practice such as performance results, failure modes, and true cost. Access is reserved for patrons.
Become a PatronBetween Convenings: Signal Over Noise
We sustain the dialogue through Insight & Foresight: long-form essays, research briefs, interviews, and multimedia pieces that carry the work forward.
This is thought leadership grounded in evidence and shaped by perspective. It supports design leadership where it matters: in studios, boardrooms, classrooms, and communities.
Who Attends
Design Futures Council convenings bring together decision-makers across design disciplines:
- Principals and partners at design firms
- Chief design officers and creative directors
- Innovation leaders and heads of design at corporations
- Deans and department chairs at design schools
- Investors in design-driven companies
- Technology leaders building tools for designers
- Policy makers shaping the future of creative industries
If your decisions shape how design is practiced, taught, funded, or applied, these convenings are designed for you.
Join Our Next Convening
Design Futures Council convenings are open to design leaders, firm principals, chief creative officers, academic heads, and other decision-makers shaping the future of design across industries.