The V&A Puts AI and Craft in the Same Room for London Design Festival

London Design Festival runs across the whole city from 12 to 20 September, and the V&A's own contribution this year is a season called Awakenings, curated by Carrie Chan and Kristian Volsing across the museum's galleries. The programme's stated aim is to provoke new consciousness around the creative and destructive potential of AI, alongside pieces exploring the non human world, sound, and identity through sculptural furniture.

Two commissions stand out for treating AI as material rather than subject matter. Aziza Kadyri's new piece, Sender Unknown, combines generative AI models with traditional Uzbek Suzani embroidery, a centuries old textile craft, rather than setting the two in opposition. Nina Davies contributes a separate work examining how human bodies are beginning to mimic the movement patterns of AI generated animation, a fairly direct answer to the discomfort many designers feel watching motion capture and generative video blur together.

The wider festival features new commissions from Henry Svendsen, Sam Ghantous, Andre Williams, Eunjo Lee, and this year's V&A Emerging Designer, the studio Playfool, spread across the museum's galleries rather than confined to a single room.

What is worth noticing here is the framing choice. A lot of design world coverage of AI in 2026 still splits into either uncritical adoption or blanket rejection. Awakenings does neither: it puts embroidery techniques with roots centuries older than any neural network next to generative tools trained last year, and treats both as legitimate craft decisions a designer makes on purpose. That is a more useful starting point for anyone in the industry actually deciding how AI fits into their own process, us included.

The programme runs at the V&A South Kensington for the length of the festival, so anyone in London this week has more than a fleeting chance to see it. Given how quickly AI shows up in design coverage as either a threat or a shortcut, a season built around sitting with the discomfort instead of resolving it feels like the more honest choice, and a useful one for a studio like ours to see in person rather than read about secondhand.