In a time shaped by rapid technological shifts and mounting global challenges, designers are being asked to do more than imagine the future. They’re being asked to take responsibility for the present. “Entering the Now,” this year’s symposium, is bringing together voices from design, architecture, technology, and beyond, to challenge participants to pause, reflect, and act with intention.

For curators Tey Bannerman and Veronica D’Souza, the idea is simple but demanding: stop projecting into distant futures or retreating into past solutions, and instead confront the reality of how we think, work, and make decisions today. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, the symposium explores how design can bridge the gap between ideas and lived experience, and why the choices we make now matter more than ever.

What does “Entering the Now” mean to you in the context of design today?

Tey: I’ve spent years designing products and building AI systems, and the single biggest lesson is that the organisations that succeed are the ones that start with the present — with how people actually think and work right now — rather than with a fantasy about what technology might do in the future. “Entering the Now” applies the same principle to design. Stop projecting. Stop reacting. Look at what’s in front of you and ask: does this decision reflect what I actually believe? That’s where agency lives.

Veronica: The past shows us what works and what doesn’t. The future is a projection screen. The now is where we bump into things. Where we see how things actually look and feel in the rooms we are in. Where decisions get made, or avoided. “Entering the Now” means refusing the comfort of nostalgia and the alibi of futurology, and staying in the present long enough to ask the more demanding questions. How are we spending our hours? What choices are we making? Our world is in an existential moment. Which makes this an unusually precise time to pause and decide what needs to stop, stay and start.

How does the symposium connect to the theme Make This Moment Matter?

Tey: Make This Moment Matter is a call to intentionality. The symposium puts that to the test. We’ve brought together people from across design, architecture, tech, neuroscience, biodesign — people who are making real choices about materials, systems, and human experience right now. We’re asking them to share not just what they’re doing, but why. And whether the “why” is good enough.

Veronica: It makes space for process over product. A pause from speed, where we can step back and reflect on what we are doing and why. We are lucky to be joined by extraordinary thinkers and makers join us from across disciplines, who will each share some of the choices they are making in the now through intimate conversations. We hope everyone who comes leaves with inspiration and maybe new connections that matter.  

What role do you see design playing in addressing global challenges today?

Tey: I learned something early in my career that has stayed with me: the gap between things that work and things people actually want to use is almost always human. Design closes that gap. In the context of global challenges — climate, inequality, technological disruption — design isn’t the solution, but it’s the discipline that makes solutions liveable. It’s the difference between a regulation on paper and a product someone actually keeps for twenty years.

Veronica: Design doesn’t live in a vacuum. It travels through systems, cultures, and ways of seeing. If we only look from one angle, we risk repeating the same patterns. When we listen wide, we get access to a more collective understanding of what we are shaping, and who it is for. A breathing signal of the world. 

Why was it important to bring together such a diverse group of speakers?

Tey: One of my core beliefs is that every failed initiative starts with the wrong question. If we only invited designers to talk about design, we’d get comfortable answers to familiar questions. We wanted unfamiliar questions. The kind that emerge when a neuroscientist challenges how an architect thinks about memory, or when an economist and a hospitality pioneer disagree about what enough looks like. When you bring that diversity of perspective together, it becomes something none of them could have had alone.

Veronica: We like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, but we are sensorial creatures first; we are moved by texture, by image, by atmosphere. Design's particular gift is to make new ways of living not only conceivable but visible, tangible, even desirable. And the stakes are high — democracy, geopolitical stability, the climate, our entanglement with technology. Taking authorship of where we want to go has rarely felt equally more urgent and more exciting. 

What do you hope attendees take away from “Entering the Now”?

Tey: I hope people leave with something that stays with them when they’re back at their desk on Monday, choosing a material, briefing a team, deciding what project to take on. If the symposium helps someone see one decision more clearly, it’s done its job.

Veronica: Design doesn’t live in a vacuum. It travels through systems, cultures, and ways of seeing. If we only look from one angle, we risk repeating the same patterns. When we listen wide, we get access to a more collective understanding of what we are shaping, and who it is for. A breathing signal of the world. 

If there’s one question you hope stays with people after the symposium, what is it?

Tey: What would change about your work if you asked “should we?” before “how might we?”

Veronica: Courage.

Book your tickets here.