Taiwan Design Week 2025: Designing the future through values
As the island nation is becoming increasingly relevant, its design exhibition is growing too. Back for its third year, this edition promises a new vision of the future, through international collaborations and local design achievements.
Taiwan Design Week (TDW) is returning for its third edition this month, running from November 29 to December 7 at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park in Taipei. This year’s theme is Design Next, exploring how design is evolving from individual solutions to addressing broader planetary issues. The island nation is known globally for its technology industry, however, this event is looking to explore the country’s future potential in design, beyond its conventional boundaries. The theme wants to explore how today’s design will shape the future of tomorrow, and what values that future will be based upon.
This edition will also converge with another institution, as TDW will host the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) conference from December 2-5. This represents a sort of homecoming, as IASDR held its inaugural conference in Taiwan in 2005, and now returns twenty years later for its biennial gathering, which in the meantime has become one of the world’s most relevant design conferences. This junction is truly positioning Taipei as a major hub for design innovation in Asia.
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Taiwan Design Week 2025 has assembled an impressive roster of speakers who will participate in this edition. Headline presenters include Don Norman, the renowned author focusing on user-centred design, Professor Stephan Wensveen, from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and Peter Lloyd, the president of IASDR.
A further highlight of the fair is the prestigious Golden Pin Design Award, which recognises excellence across disciplines, from product and communication design to spatial and integrated projects. The award ceremony will take place on December 5, while the 2025 Golden Pin Design Award Exhibition is already open at the Taiwan Design Museum in Taipei’s Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (since November 25), presenting more than one hundred winning works from this year.
Curated by hidden-domain studio, the exhibition is framed by the theme “The Spectrum of Scale,” inviting visitors to consider contemporary design through both the jury’s perspective and a series of perceptual scales. On view until April 26, 2026, it offers design enthusiasts the chance to encounter this year’s most notable projects in person.
Established in 1981, the Golden Pin has grown into the most influential design award in the local market, organised by the Taiwan Design Research Institute and supported by Taiwan’s Industrial Development Administration. This year’s edition attracted entries from 13 countries across all continents, of which 429 designs received the Golden Pin Design Mark.
Following last year’s successful collaboration with Poland, TDW 2025 expands its European partnerships with the Taiwan-Czech Design Forum. This initiative partners with the newly founded Czech Centre Taipei and looks to create a platform for a cultural exchange between the two countries and their design communities. Czech designers specialised in sustainable fashion will showcase their work during the forum, highlighting new possibilities in cross-cultural collaboration.
TDW will also offer curated Industry Tours that will show visitors how the local design industry works with real-life applications, including visits to the MINIWIZ Trash Kitchen, which explores new approaches to waste transformation and circular design for recycling, and to Acer Incorporated, which will demonstrate how one of Taiwan’s leading technology companies designs and operates.
This year’s edition arrives at a moment when Taiwan is actively positioning itself as more than just a technology powerhouse, but instead wants to explore its potential as a design innovation leader, bridging research, industry, and culture. About the event’s theme, Design Next, the organisation tells us that “it is not a prediction of the future, but a reminder. The future holds infinite possibilities, but what it becomes depends on the values we uphold: how we design reflects what we believe in. Our world never lacks contradictions or conflicts, but these tensions are what drive progress. Today’s design achievements encourage us, fill us with passion and care, and fuel our hope for a better tomorrow.”
