The Global Design Organization, What Design Can Do (WDCD), Makes its South Asian Debut with the Launch of WDCD Live Delhi 2025

The Global Design Organization, What Design Can Do (WDCD), Makes its South Asian Debut with the Launch of WDCD Live Delhi 2025

With an aim to build a resilient future powered by design, WDCD is bringing to India a festival to address urgent challenges of our time: climate action and social change.

New Delhi - November 06, 2024: On 8 March 2025, What Design Can Do (WDCD) will host its first-ever event in South Asia with WDCD Live Delhi 2025. This groundbreaking festival will bring together designers, innovators, and changemakers to address the most urgent challenges of our time: climate action and social change. In partnership with Unbox Cultural Futures, Quicksand, and The Design Village, WDCD Live Delhi 2025 will explore innovative and regenerative solutions for a fairer and more resilient future.

After previous editions in Amsterdam, São Paulo, and Mexico City, the 2025 edition of the festival is coming to the vibrant city of New Delhi. The event comes at a critical time as India faces increasing climate-related challenges - India is the largest plastic polluter, coastal communities are being threatened by rising sea levels, unpredictable monsoon patterns are disrupting agriculture, intensifying heat waves are endangering millions, among many other crises that we are facing.

WDCD Live Delhi 2025, which is being held at New Delhi's India Habitat Centre, will call on creative minds to tackle these urgent issues through fresh and unexpected strategies that balance mitigation and adaptation.

Join us on 8 March 2025 for WDCD Live Delhi 2025!
For more information and to pre-register for early access, visit https://shorturl.at/ucAEL

"We're very excited about What Design Can Do coming to Delhi. The climate urgencies we face as a region, requires a uniquely local response as much as it requires collective global action. Any effort towards climate action must factor the social, economic, political and cultural nuances of South Asia. WDCD has, over the last decade, created a powerful global platform for designers and the wider creative community to demonstrate the power of design in addressing issues of climate justice and social equity. This is an incredible opportunity to center the voices and imaginations of creative changemakers from India and the South Asian region. As design practices that have worked on issues of social impact over the last two decades in the Global South, Quicksand and Unbox are honored to co-produce this festival with WDCD", said Ayush Chauhan, Co-Founder - Quicksand.

"The planetary climate crisis calls for spaces of joint action and urgent collaborative efforts, WDCD's Delhi inaugural edition intends to foster a collective, a community of stakeholders passionate to take charge of these key and critical themes for change, resilience and social justice", said Sourabh Gupta, Founder of The Design Village.

Supported by the Global Methane Hub and the Rockefeller Foundation, two leading organisations committed to climate action, the one-day festival will include a mix of talks, workshops, exhibitions, and cultural performances, featuring some of the most influential voices in the creative industries. Attendees will have the opportunity to connect with entrepreneurs, environmentalists, researchers, designers, and decision-makers from across the globe to explore how creativity can fuel positive change.

This year's festival will dive into some of the most challenging environmental and social issues of our time, as well as the threads that connect them:

1. Circular Planet: Design for a Regenerative Future

Can we envision a world where the cycles of nature inspire the way we design, produce, and consume? By drawing inspiration from Indigenous traditional practices and knowledge systems that have been long grounded in circularity, we invite designers to rethink materials, energy, and infrastructure in a way that can lead to solutions that not only meet human needs but also restore the health of ecosystems.

2. The Power of Community: Design through Radical Collaboration

This theme calls for radical collaboration across all sectors-policymakers, local communities, creatives, investors, and industries-to deliver impactful solutions where they are needed most. Together, we will explore how design can help reconnect people, amplify underrepresented voices, and create opportunities for healing and learning.

3. Rethinking Technology

Amidst the rapid rise of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, creative practitioners, curious by nature, are not afraid to experiment with new tools and processes, and many increasingly turn to them in their search for solutions.

ABOUT WHAT DESIGN CAN DO

What Design Can Do (WDCD) is an international organization that advocates for design as a tool for social change. Since 2011, we have undertaken numerous activities to promote the role of designers in addressing the world's most pressing societal and environmental issues. WDCD has hosted 15 successful conferences in Amsterdam, São Paulo, and México City. In 2016 WDCD launched an ambitious design challenge programme that engages the creative community with urgent societal issues such as the well-being of refugees and climate change. To see previous Challenge winners, visit www.whatdesigncando.com/projects/ For more information, visit www.whatdesigncando.com

ABOUT UNBOX CULTURAL FUTURES

Unbox Cultural Futures is a cultural platform that builds community at the intersection of disciplines to explore new narratives and reimagine India's plural futures. It started operations in 2011 began as a festival bringing together unlikely like-minds in 2011, and has since grown into a large world of labs, public engagement platforms, research projects, installations, and publications, building collaborative art, design, and tech projects to explore new narratives for cultural enquiry and expression.

ABOUT THE DESIGN VILLAGE

The Design Village is an educational ecosystem for discerning learners, built by globally-acknowledged academicians and industry experts, offering a comprehensive and future-oriented design education, that prepares leaders who design to transform the world. The village is a metaphor for the design village both in its physicality and philosophy, and the village educates designers the world actually needs and ones that the world didn't know it needed.

Tweede Kostverlorenkade 132H, 1053 SE Amsterdam, Netherlands

ABOUT WHAT DESIGN CAN DO

What Design Can Do (WDCD) is an international organization that advocates for design as a tool for social change. Since 2011, we have undertaken numerous activities to promote the role of designers in addressing the world's most pressing societal and environmental issues. WDCD has hosted 15 successful conferences in Amsterdam, São Paulo, and México City. In 2016 WDCD launched an ambitious design challenge programme that engages the creative community with urgent societal issues such as the well-being of refugees and climate change. To see previous Challenge winners, visit www.whatdesigncando.com/projects/ For more information, visit www.whatdesigncando.com

This release was published on openPR.