Header: Courtesy of MDF
The new edition of Madrid Design Festival, the international design festival organised by La Fábrica, will once again turn the city into the sector’s major event during the month of February and until 15 March 2025. It will be a meeting point where design displays its transforming power, showing practices, initiatives, and projects that reveal that design can be an essential tool for tackling the multiple challenges of a society in constant evolution. A discipline capable of anticipating, of being the starting point for any structural change and the answer to the most complex problems.
Through its extensive program, and under the slogan “Redesigning the World”, the festival publicises creative agents, showing inspiring examples of creativity and responsibility towards the environment and society.
“Design is much more than a sign of Madrid’s identity. It is part of its nature. Throughout these years, at Madrid Design Festival we have been committed to showcasing the best of international design, to vindicating the place of our city and our country on the map, and to projecting the richness of a unique creative ecosystem that is permanently redesigning, from multiple perspectives, a formidable city“, explained Álvaro Matías, director of Madrid Design Festival.
The next edition of 2025 will turn Madrid into the epicentre of connected design, with an extensive program that includes more than 200 events, including exhibitions, activities, installations, conferences, space openings, open studios, and showrooms. A meeting where design, in all its disciplines—graphic, digital, fashion, product, industrial, lighting, architecture, and more—is presented as a driving force for change in industry, crafts, urban planning, and services.
La Línea Sueña
Light will be one of the great protagonists of this edition that presents, for the first time in the history of the festival, a monographic exhibition on the relationship between light and space, offering a sensorial experience at the Fernán Gómez Theatre curated by Javier Riera. “La Línea Sueña” will showcase the work of 45 creators through 70 different pieces spanning different disciplines, from interior lighting to creating lamps and other elements. They all share a sense of design closely linked to architecture and landscape, integrating a particular understanding of light in which the technical and the metaphorical run in parallel.
Great figures of national and international design
In the extensive program of the festival, Madrid will count on the presence of renowned designers such as Sir Paul Smith, one of the great icons of fashion design in the world, and André Ricard, a great visionary of design in our country. Both will be the Madrid Design Festival Awards 2024, which recognize the trajectory of these two great figures of design.
Alongside them, many other leading names will share the festival program, which will bring together professionals, brands, and institutions to imagine a better world. Bethan Laura Wood, Raffaella Mangiaroti, Cecilia Mozse Tham, Juli Capella, Inma Bermúdez, Héctor Serrano, Jorge Penedés, José Antonio Coderch, Ramón Úbeda, Toni Porto, Patrizia Moroso, Mario Cucinela, and Tom Dixon will be part of the festival program in its various activities.
They will present proposals and initiatives by restless creators with an ethical, responsible, conscious, and sustainable outlook, capable of changing the game’s rules and promoting a change of paradigm with ideas that start from our immediate environment and transcend the local sphere to resolve global issues.
Fiesta Design at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza
For the third consecutive year, MDF25 is organising Fiesta Design, “the festival within the festival”, the great celebration of design with installations, workshops, meetings, exhibitions, and presentations of both brands and institutions in total union with the creatives. In previous editions, 20,000 people have passed through this neuralgic point of the festival, which is held in parallel to the professional days of the festival.
From 12 to 23 February, the event will be hosted at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) where, among others, designers Inma Bermúdez, Mut Design, Radiante Light Art Studio, OTEYZA, Inés Sistiaga, and Regina Dejiménez; brands Amazon, MINI, Ikea, Sancal, Formica, Actiu, and Solán de Cabras; and some of the most influential design schools, such as IED, Elisava Madrid, UDIT, and the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, among many others, will be presenting their works,
Fiesta Design will be filled with workshops, presentations, and pop-ups throughout the ten days in the multifunctional spaces of the ILE with proposals for all audiences, such as the workshops with BIC Kids, the presentation of PEFC Spain, the workshops and presentations of IE, and many more to be confirmed in the coming weeks.
Tejiendo Redes (Weaving Networks)
As part of its 2025 edition, the Madrid Design Festival reinforces its commitment to design as a tool for tackling essential challenges through the Weaving Networks initiative. This year, the festival highlights wool’s critical situation in Spain, highlighting its historical role and potential as a sustainable and culturally significant resource.
Wool, once known as Spain’s “white gold“, represented an economic and cultural pillar connecting rural communities, artisans, and designers. However, today it faces a discouraging panorama: barely 1% of textile fibres globally are wool, and 90% of Spanish wool is wasted, generating economic losses.
From this reality, MDF25 seeks to empower the actors involved, make their work visible, and demonstrate how design can be key to reversing this situation. Among the planned actions, the festival will have a specific website that will include an updated analysis of the state of wool in Spain, examples of good practices, and a network of agents working on innovative solutions. In addition, there will be installations, workshops, and strategic alliances with companies, institutions, and creators, promoting the integration of wool in various industries.
One of the highlights will be the collaboration with Amazon, whose action can be seen during Fiesta Design, which will include projects such as the development of a unique collection made from the wool of endangered sheep, led by the designers Inés Sistiaga and Regina Dejiménez. This project will involve the participation of wool producer WoolDreamers and its brand, Wool4life, and industrial production centres in the Valencian Community, combining contemporary design with traditional craftsmanship. Regina Dejiménez, a textile artist, will present an installation that will explore the expressive and cultural potential of wool through an artistic work.
With these initiatives, MDF25 positions itself as a space for activism and reflection, inviting design professionals, companies, institutions, and citizens to join together to protect and valorize this historical and sustainable resource.
MINI Design Award
The MINI Design Award is now in its fifth year and continues to recognize the work of all design professionals who focus their activity on improving life in cities. For the first time in the history of the festival, this edition will feature a retrospective exhibition of the different prizewinners curated by the designer Ángela Polanco under the title of “Traversing a landscape: strategic dialogues between professionals and new talents,” which commemorates the first five years of this award.
Taking part in this new edition of the MINI Design Award are professionals from the world of design, such as Toni Segarra, Ramón Úbeda, and Alberto Barreiro; journalists specializing in design, such as Soledad Lorenzo, Daniel García, Emerio Arena, and Tachy Mora; and representatives of public and private institutions connected with the world of design, such as Isabel Roig, Mireia Escobar, Juan Mellén, and Carmen Bustos.
Over the course of five editions, the award has highlighted innovative proposals in mobility, sustainability, and urban coexistence, functioning as a platform for designers of all generations. So far, it has received more than 500 professional entries and 269 entries from new talents, with the participation of 80 universities and design schools.
In conjunction with MINI and as part of Fiesta Design, the site-specific exhibition “Cartografía del Rayo” by Radiante Light Art Studio will also arrive, an artistic installation presented as a series of hermetic transparent display cases that seem to emerge directly from the earth, creating a connection between the natural environment and a space for visual experimentation.
Berlin, this year’s guest city
This year, Berlin joins the Madrid Design Festival as a guest city. Twinned with Madrid and recognized as a Design Capital by UNESCO since 2006, in Berlin, tradition, modernity, history, and creativity converge in perfect harmony.
The German capital, home to more than 5,000 design students and host of the prestigious iF Design Awards since 1953, is positioned as one of the most outstanding creative poles in Europe. In Berlin, past and present intertwine with sobriety and audacity, luxury and avant-garde, giving shape to a city with a unique magnetism.
In this edition, Berlin will take center stage through the presentation of emerging talents who are redefining the city’s cultural and design scene, highlighting their ability to inspire and influence the international creative landscape.
Castilla-La Mancha Designs, Tramar el Barro (Weaving clay)
The artisan legacy of Castilla-La Mancha as a general sponsor will have its space thanks to Castilla-La Mancha Diseña. “Tramar el Barro,” an exhibition curated by designer Tomás Alía, will present all the knowledge and mastery of this region’s pottery in a contemporary key, with exclusive pieces created specifically for the Madrid Design Festival.
The exhibition will unify the different techniques of the potters, which means that the artisans will compose, hand in hand, a fabric in which different finishes of fired clay and lacquered clay in different tones will be interspersed. Furthermore, to respect the traditional local finishes, the blue of Talavera de la Reina and the aqua green of Puente del Arzobispo will be the chosen colours for the project.
Diseñoesfera
Institution-business-design collaboration: this is how the concept of Diseñoesfera was born, a space that the Madrid Design Festival cultivates with special care as it is a strategic block that is strengthened edition after edition as a differentiating element.
Under the umbrella of Fiesta Design, on 17 and 18 February, “Design a Trois” will take place: an initiative that promotes direct collaboration between companies operating in Madrid and designers from different disciplines, with the support of the Comunidad de Madrid.
The program will connect fifteen companies whose strategic approach already incorporates design in their working methodologies with designers, design studios, and students. Each company will raise the main issues they are working on that require a design approach in order to establish a dialogue that allows for the exchange of ideas and the development of creative proposals.
Viveros: creative laboratories
On 19 February, Fiesta Design will host the presentation of the results of the Viveros project, a series of creative laboratories coordinated by the Tetuán Crea collective. At this meeting, the project “El Arte de la Mesa” will be presented, the result of a series of workshops promoted by this group to bring design closer as an opportunity and as a professional outlet. This innovative social design initiative promotes creativity, the power of the collective, co-creation, and the visibility of groups that do not normally participate in these initiatives. It is organized with the support of the Consejería de Economía, Hacienda y Empleo de la Comunidad de Madrid.
Madrid DesignPRO: Origin
From 19 to 22 February, the Institución Libre de Enseñanza will host the Madrid DesignPRO program. In these days, big names in international design will take the floor in a multitude of formats designed to give voice to different practices of this discipline: round tables, conferences, conversations, and more, all thanks to the sponsorship of the Comunidad de Madrid. MDF is a space of origin. A place where ideas, collaborations, and projects find the ideal ground to be born, grow, and evolve. This concept of origin becomes this year’s theme for all the activities aimed at the professional fabric.
Origin is understood as a principle, root, or cause, as a return to the fundamentals of design to explore how its essence connects with the needs of the present and the possibilities of the future. Origin is also the starting point, allowing us to analyze how design can recover essential values and project them towards a more conscious and innovative future. Finally, origin is an inexhaustible source of ideas and creativity. In this sense, the professional conferences, Madrid Design PRO, will highlight the value of design as a powerful tool for reflection and action.
The program will feature headliners such as designer Sir Paul Smith (in conversation with leading British architecture and design writer, critic, and curator Deyan Sudjic) and the contemporary design studio WE+, founded by Toshiya Hayashi and Hokuto Ando, whose work shapes new perspectives and values. The studio explores the possibilities of an alternative design that establishes a close coexistence with the natural and social environment and incorporates a diversity of values such as convenience and rationality.
The diversity of disciplines will, therefore come together under this umbrella at the Madrid Design Festival thanks to names such as Patrizia Moroso, creative director of Moroso S.p.a., Italian architect Mario Cucinella, designer and activist Kavita Parmar, National Design Award winners Inma Bermúdez and Héctor Serrano, director and founder of Futurity Studio, Cecilia Mozse Tham, textile designer Inés Quezada, and anthropologist Beatriz Muñoz Goetsch.
Madrid Diseña
One of the strategic lines of the Madrid Design Festival originates in the city that gave it its name 8 years ago. Since its first edition, the festival has been picking up the signals emanating from a city marked by an open, creative, and contemporary attitude. These vibrations are integrated into the essence of the festival, which interprets and amplifies this energy to give it back to the world in the form of a program capable of projecting Madrid as one of the world’s major creative hubs.
It’s not that Madrid has design, it’s that Madrid designs itself: a city that constantly redraws itself, reinvents itself, and makes itself. It does so thanks to a combination of talent, industry, and institutions that converge under the umbrella of Madrid Diseña, where public and private initiatives come together in exhibitions, showrooms, open studios, and activities that celebrate design in all its dimensions in total, more than 120 proposals spread across different parts of the city for a whole month.
Exhibitions such as “Mujer x mujer” (Woman x Woman) and “Design in Transition”, an exhibition designed by Belén Moneo and curated by Marisa Santamaría, continue the exploration of female creativity and innovation in the 21st century. “La luz de Coderch”, on the other hand, celebrates the legacy of the architect José Antonio Coderch and will premiere the Only You Boutique hotel in Barquillo as the venue for MDF25.
Toni Porto’s sculptures made from hollowed-out wood can be visited at the Tiempos Modernos gallery, plus the exhibition “This is not a building,” which will showcase architectural talents that explore new creative terrain in design and art, having been curated by Diario Design at The Social Hub. The Huakal space joins the festival with the exhibition “La Cama Mexicana,” a project captained by Studio Bañón and Huakal that shows a dialogue between Mexican and Spanish culture and crafts through their points of connection.
In its eighth edition, MDF continues to grow and expand its points of reference on Madrid’s design map, adding galleries, presentations, showrooms, exhibitions, and activities that are spread over an entire month.
