Creative Resilience at Barcelona Design Week 2025
Marking its 20th edition, Barcelona Design Week unfolds as a city-wide reflection on how design works through conversation, collaboration, and doubt.
“Creative resilience,” said Andrés Reisinger as he stepped off stage, “is an oxymoron.” It set the tone for Barcelona Design Week 2025 (October 7–17), which celebrates its 20th edition under the theme Creative Resilience. Ten days, more than 150 events, 15 venues and one question that quietly runs through them all: how does design adapt when the world doesn’t wait? We’re here to listen. To see what remains when the slogans fade and the conversations begin.
An opening that mirrored our times
On the Opening Night at the Roca Barcelona Gallery, Andrés Reisinger and Isern Serra took the stage under the title “Creative Resilience and Physical-Digital Spaces.” Two voices, one mood: reflective, searching and self-aware. They spoke not about design as discipline, but as attitude. About the courage to show unfinished ideas. About spaces where digital and material merge until they become something else. Something uncertain, but alive.
Gallery
Open full width
Open full width
Reisinger shared the story of a digital work that a Belgian collector had discovered online — only for it to become a physical piece a year later. “Some works,” he said, “are born from context and person.” He explained how he often sets himself challenges before others do, a way to stay uncomfortable, to keep asking new questions.
Serra, meanwhile, offered his own language: a Mediterranean spirit rooted in craft yet constantly testing its limits. “Con pocas cosas bien hechas se puede llegar muy lejos,” he said, “with few things done well, you can go far”. In a time obsessed with more, it sounded almost radical.
Reisinger’s afterthought that creative resilience is an oxymoron wasn’t a rejection of optimism, but an acknowledgment of reality. Resilience isn’t static. It bends, falters, and rebuilds itself in new forms.
Twenty years, one pulse
In conversation, Isabel Roig radiates the same clarity that defines her work. As Executive Director of the Barcelona Creativity & Design Foundation, she has steered Design Week since its early editions not by chasing trends, but by building continuity.
She describes the BDW as “a living ecosystem” that connects creativity with the city’s social and economic fabric. For her, it’s never been about staging an image of design, but about fostering dialogue. The kind that generates new connections across disciplines, generations, and industries.
What keeps her motivated after twenty years?”‘The people,” she said. “Design is not about form, it’s about relationships. The moment we stop listening to each other, we lose what makes this city thrive.”
Her words mirror the tone of this year’s edition — open, plural, and forward-looking, grounded in inspiration, community, and future not as slogans, but as coordinates.
In her vision, resilience is less about endurance than evolution. “We have to keep questioning ourselves,” she told me. “That’s what design does best. It transforms doubt into movement.”
A world in flux
Barcelona doesn’t shout in English. It murmurs in Catalan, argues in Spanish, and moves at its own pace. And somehow, that feels right. Coherence, after all, begins with rhythm, not reach.
At the Disseny Hub, the Industrial Design Day gathered studios like Kave Home and Roche to explore what industrial design means when technology and responsibility want to coexist. At Cosentino City Showroom, a collaboration with CREVIN explored the role of sustainability in textile design and how to integrate sustainable criteria into projects that aspire to be durable, functional and emotionally relevant. And later, Ments Resilients, Coses Belles offered a softer format, blending conversation, music, and exchange, a proof that design, too, needs intimacy. The LedsC4 installation in collaboration with ELIURPI at Calle Bailen celebrated light at day and night, along with matcha cocktails and Alhambra Cerveza in over 150sqm typical Barcelonese maison.
Technology, attention, climate, politics — all in motion. But perhaps that’s why Barcelona’s pulse feels so alive right now. To design today is not to be certain. It’s to act in the middle of doubt.
What’s next — Designing the days ahead
In the days to come, Barcelona will unfold in all directions. Fifteen meeting points, more than 150 happenings — a choreography of exhibitions, talks, and encounters across the city.
Among them:
- Underground BDW — a parking gallery turned laboratory for experimentation.
- Vibia’s Shaping Atmospheres at Orac Experience — exploring light as emotion, not function.
- Misschiefs at Lab36 — a feminist platform blending art, design, and textile narratives.
Together, they form a map of creative motion. Less a celebration, more a conversation in progress.
Final echo
As the crowd thinned out at Roca Barcelona Gallery, Reisinger’s words lingered — not as a warning, but as a quiet truth: creative resilience will never be simple. And maybe it shouldn’t be.
Barcelona doesn’t resist contradiction; it thrives on it. The city absorbs uncertainty and turns it into movement. The kind that keeps ideas circulating and boundaries dissolving.
Because design weeks aren’t about answers. They’re mirrors of where we are: brief-free spaces where the wildest ideas surface, only to seem perfectly reasonable a few years later.
