Constellations of Possible Futures
The exhibitions of this edition explore how traditions, gestures, and resources, often rooted in deep memory, can become instruments for orientation in a moment defined by rapid transformation. They propose worlds in which craft becomes navigation; materials trace new geographies, ecologies frame emerging horizons, and rupture opens a space for renewal. Together, they form a subtle yet coherent firmament, a network of practices that question linear narratives and instead trace plural, shifting trajectories.
Around this core, the Biennial activates multiple spaces for encounters, moments of shared thinking, exchange, and making, including interactive workshops that foreground knowledge transmission as a living practice. The public programme curated by Art for Tomorrow places dialogue at the centre, treating conversation itself as a form of design. Through the presence of leading international voices, these sessions reveal how new relationships and imaginaries can take shape, offering unexpected points of convergence and resonance.
International participations and collaborations intensify this dynamic. The Design Doha Prize, dedicated to emerging and established talents from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, is supported by a distinguished jury composed of some of the most respected figures in today’s worldwide design discourse. With Mexico as the guest country of the 2026 edition, the Biennial further expands its geography of exchange, affirming that the future of design will not emerge from isolated centres of production but through reciprocity, through networks able to embrace distance, urgency, and the multiplicity of cultural languages. Local perspectives become global interlocutors, and global perspectives find grounding in local insight.
Design Doha Biennial 2026 aims to demonstrate that design is a cultural practice capable of generating orientation in uncertain times, and that material memory can illuminate new routes. For this reason, it stands as a proposition that a multiplicity of perspectives, when held together, can form a horizon, wide enough to imagine the worlds to come.