Turning futures thinking into something you can touch, question, and act
Future Days returns for its third edition under the theme Currents of Tomorrow, moving from Lisbon to the Royal Danish Playhouse during Copenhagen Design Week — with a lineup of global voices exploring water, imagination, meaning, and the cities of tomorrow.
After two editions that positioned it as one of the most relevant emerging platforms for design foresight, Future Days 2026 enters a new phase. This year, the festival moves to Copenhagen, taking over the Royal Danish Playhouse during Copenhagen Design Week (10–12 June), and signaling a shift from conversation to something more ambitious: the construction of a shared infrastructure for imagining futures.
Following its previous editions in Lisbon—where the focus was on building a global dialogue across disciplines—this third chapter marks a geographical and conceptual expansion. The theme, “Currents of Tomorrow,” reflects a growing urgency: understanding how ideas, systems, and cultures flow, intersect, and ultimately shape the conditions of tomorrow.
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We covered Future Days 2025 when the festival gathered over 600 innovators and changemakers from 30 countries at Lisbon’s Estufa Fria around the theme of Towards Symbiotic Futures. What struck us then was how the festival managed to feel less like a conference and more like a movement — a space where policy met poetry, and systems thinking shared a room with sonic experiences. Future Days 2026 edition picks up that thread and pulls it further.
From platform to ecosystem
When we first talked with Meri Sahade and Uri Casademont, Founders of the project, it was clear that the initiative was not simply another design festival. In 2026, that intention becomes more explicit. “Our journey reflects a clear demand for meaningful international dialogue across disciplines,” explain the founders. “Copenhagen marks an important step in expanding this shared infrastructure, and creating a global space for imagination as a civic practice.” This idea of imagination as a civic practice is key. It reframes design not as a tool for producing objects, but as a method for collectively navigating uncertainty.
Future Days 2026: Five currents shaping the future
The 2026 programme is structured around five thematic “currents,” each addressing a critical dimension of contemporary transformation:
- Back to Connection — rethinking human relationships in an increasingly mediated world
- Water Commons — exploring water as a shared resource and a design challenge
- Infrastructures of Imagination — building systems that enable collective foresight
- The Living Lab — experimentation as a continuous, embedded practice
- Economies of Meaning — redefining value beyond growth and extraction
Together, these themes outline a shift away from linear problem-solving towards a more systemic and relational understanding of design, where social, environmental, and cultural dimensions are deeply intertwined.
A programme between thinking and doing
Future Days 2026 continues to operate across multiple formats—talks, participatory labs, exhibitions, and curated site visits—bridging theory and practice. The confirmed line-up reflects this hybrid approach, bringing together voices such as Anab Jain, Julia Watson, Christian Bason, and Bas van de Poel, among others.
Their work spans fields from speculative design and AI to indigenous knowledge, urban resilience, and governance—highlighting the increasingly blurred boundaries between disciplines. What emerges is not a traditional conference, but a distributed learning environment, where participants are invited not just to listen, but to engage, test, and co-create.
Strategic partnerships and global relevance
The growing relevance of Future Days is also reflected in its partnerships. For the 2026 edition, the festival is supported by organizations such as H&M (Innovation & Exploration), PwC Japan (Future Design Lab), and the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies—a long-standing institution in futures thinking.
These collaborations reinforce the platform’s positioning at the intersection of industry, policy, and design, suggesting that the conversations happening within Future Days are increasingly tied to real-world transformation.
What’s next for design?
If previous editions were about framing questions, Future Days 2026 is about testing answers. By moving to Copenhagen—a city often associated with progressive urban models and systemic thinking—the festival aligns itself with a context that embodies many of the ideas it seeks to explore. But more importantly, it signals a broader evolution: from design as discourse to design as infrastructure.
In a moment where the challenges facing society are deeply interconnected, Future Days proposes a different role for design—one that is less about authorship and more about facilitating collective futures. The question is no longer just what should we design next? But how do we design the conditions that allow better futures to emerge?
