Es Devlin Opens the V&A's Global Design Forum With a Case for Designing Futures

The V&A's Global Design Forum returned for London Design Festival on 12 September under the theme Worlds in Motion, curated by Rhiarna Dhaliwal across three days: Designing Futures, Designing Atmospheres, and Designing Common Grounds. Opening day belonged to Es Devlin, the stage designer behind Beyonce's and The Weeknd's tours, the 2022 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, and the poem generating UK pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai, in conversation with Ben Evans about new technologies reshaping design practice.

Devlin's work sits at a scale most studios never touch, entire stadiums and national pavilions built around a single idea, but the questions underneath it are the same ones any design team wrestles with at any size: how much of a design should react to its audience in real time, and how much of that reactivity is genuine versus decorative. Her UK pavilion at Dubai generated poetry live from words submitted by visitors, a piece that only worked because the underlying technology stayed invisible behind a strong, singular idea.

The three day structure of this year's forum, futures, atmospheres, then common grounds, moves deliberately from technology and speculation on day one towards craft and shared practice by day three, with sessions on sensory design and a panel on the evolving role of craft skills closing out the programme. It is a considered response to a criticism often levelled at design conferences: too much time on what is technologically possible, not enough on the slower, harder to demo work of getting practitioners to actually agree on shared standards and values.

For a studio like ours, working at a very different scale to a Devlin production, the useful takeaway is the same one that runs through her work: the technology should disappear behind the idea, not the other way round. That is as true of an exhibition stand's lighting rig as it is of a stadium show watched by eighty thousand people.