European Design Festival 2025: Ex-Centric Design

This June, the European Design Festival arrives in Ljubljana with a clear intent: to shift the lens, to explore what happens when we step away from the centre — conceptually, geographically, and creatively. Under the theme Ex-Centric Design, the Festival offers a packed, city-wide programme where the unconventional becomes the main attraction.

Designers, studios, students, educators, institutions, and curious minds will gather in Slovenia’s capital from 2 to 8 June for a week-long journey through the edges of design thinking and practice. It’s not just a festival. It’s a walk through the future of design — viewed from the side.

A Day-by-Day Exploration
Monday, 2 June

The Festival opens with the first of three student exhibitions under the title Ex-Centric Design, hosted at the Faculty of Design. These are not typical student showcases: the work reflects deeply personal interpretations of eccentricity, marginality, and expressive autonomy — illustrations that blur the line between technique and instinct.

Tuesday, 3 June
The conversation continues at the UL Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, where students explore apocalyptic and interdisciplinary responses to today’s chaotic visual culture. From analog methods to digital hybridity, the projects ask how design might reflect and resist the noise of global reality.

Thursday, 5 June
This day is a deep dive. The legendary Studio Walks guide visitors through seven local design studios in the heart of Ljubljana — from RAW and Monoform to Tiporenesansa and Visualbraingravity — offering behind-the-scenes insights into workspaces, methods, and conversations in motion.

Later that afternoon, the Academy of Fine Arts and Design presents its Ex-Centric Design exhibition: a provocative mix of student boldness and academic rigour, where visual communication becomes a tool of critique and manifesto.

In the evening, at Cukrarna Gallery, we go back to Sarajevo through the lens of TRIO — the revolutionary Bosnian design collective active before and during the war. The exhibition and talk, Greetings from Sarajevo, captures the resilience and brilliance of design under siege.

A Festival of Voices
The Main Stage (Hotel Union) opens on Friday, 6 June, with keynote talks from leading voices in European design:

• Petra Černe Oven revisits modernism through the life and work of Jože Brumen — one of Slovenia’s most influential designers.
• Augustinas Paukštė from Andstudio shares a raw, honest story of creative perseverance from the Baltics to the international scene.
• TypeTogether’s Agyei Archer talks about building a decentralised global foundry — and what that means for language, culture, and design systems.
• Skrabzi (Dorotea Škrabo) shows us how nostalgia, humour, and digital remix culture can become a serious tool for artistic expression.
• Andrej&Andrej take us inside their concept-driven design studio in Bratislava, where civic and cultural identities come to life.
  
  

Saturday’s programme brings in:

• Anna-Mari Tenhunen, whose approach to book design mixes materiality with wonder.
• Morula Type (Valerio Monopoli), who proves that sometimes one letter is enough to rewrite a system.
• Studio Gagarin, based in the middle of the Atlantic, remind us how design can flourish far from creative capitals.
• Nejc Prah, one of Slovenia’s most recognised voices, reflects on scaling visual identity with playfulness and energy.
• CLEVER°FRANKE unpacks the challenges of designing with data — where clarity meets complexity, and subjectivity plays a role.

ICoD Regional Meeting: Ethics, AI, and Action
Hosted in parallel on Friday at Hotel Slon, the International Council of Design brings together a full-day programme on ethics and professionalism in design. With speakers like:

• Melike Taşcıoğlu Vaughan, opening the conversation on ICoD’s future
• Lawrence Zeegen, on Generation Alpha and the design challenges ahead
• Iva Babaja and Anssi Kähärä, unpacking codes of conduct in real practice
• Johnathon Strebly and Kyle Rath, leading dialogue and workshops on how ethics and AI reshape the field

It’s not theory for theory’s sake — it’s a call for structure, reflection, and collective responsibility in the industry.

Exhibitions That Expand the Frame
Throughout the city, exhibitions contextualise design as a cultural, political and poetic act. Notable entries include:

• “Eccentricity: Design from the Off-Centre” at City Hall Atrium, focusing on radical graphic design in the former Yugoslavia.
• The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, under the title The Oracle: On Fantasy and Freedom, curated by Chus Martínez.
• The ICI Student Exhibition from Xiamen University in China, merging digital storytelling, sustainability, and intercultural thinking.

Design You Can Touch
This year’s workshops allow you to get your hands dirty — in the best way. TipoRenesansa invites you into a traditional letterpress studio to set wood type by hand and print your own poster. Meanwhile, on the Business Stage, workshops dive into design thinking, strategy, and design for healthcare (with Better).

Awards and Afterparty
And of course, on Saturday night, the spotlight turns to the European Design Awards Gala at the historic Grand Union Hall. An evening of recognition, emotion and celebration, followed by the official Afterparty in the garden — because great design deserves to be toasted.

This is Not a Typical Festival
The European Design Festival 2025 doesn’t just present design — it questions it. It challenges where we look, who we listen to, and what we value in creative work. It’s a place where the off-centre becomes the centre — not by accident, but by design.

Whether you’re coming for the talks, the awards, the walks or the workshops, Ljubljana is where design gathers this June.

Check the full programme and get your tickets here