Header: Milan Design Week 2025 by Bernard McCoy
This year, the Atlanta Design Festival invites the global design community to reflect on a single idea: BE MUSICA. Like music, design begins where words end. It reaches us through rhythm, repetition, silence, and variation. It pulls the future forward through pattern and disruption.
This is not a slogan, it’s a position
Design is a system of feeling. It structures emotion into experience, creates harmony where there was conflict and possibility where there was absence. Both music and design rely on composition: a process of assembling the disparate into something whole. Both also require listening before expression and intuition before execution.
Music doesn’t ask permission to be useful, it moves us without instruction and belongs to everyone. Its value isn’t in what it solves but in what it makes possible. This is the challenge for design today: not to fix, but to invite; not to perfect, but to participate. The most powerful forms of design do not speak over people, they simply bring people in.
In this view, creativity isn’t a personal triumph but a shared capacity. What matters is not the author, but the arrangement. Not the signature, but the signal. Excellence is measured not by novelty, but by clarity, empathy, and utility.
A musician doesn’t play to dominate the room, they play to tune the room. They listen to the others. They find tempo together. They improvise, adjust, and build. When design works this way and is responsive, alert, and generous, it becomes more than a product: it becomes an ethic.
The world needs that ethic. The design economy must move beyond spectacle and speed, it must become a space of care, stewardship, and mutual benefit. Not louder, clearer. Not bigger, better. In a fractured world, the role of design is not to decorate dysfunction but to restore balance, to make room, to amplify connection. To invite the dance.
To BE MUSICA is to believe in design as a unifier. To believe in design as the quiet force that holds a city together and turns noise into coherence. That makes space for everyone in the rhythm.
Together at the Atlanta Design Festival
The 2025 Atlanta Design Festival invites you to join that rhythm, whether you are a designer, policymaker, developer, artist, or educator. Participating is to celebrate a community shaping the future of cities, culture, and creative economies.
The Festival runs from September 27 to October 5, 2025, with the main events including the Creative Futures Conference, Blueprints & BBQ, CEU-accredited seminars, and the MA! Architecture Tours. Each programme offers space to connect, collaborate, and align vision with action.
