UNFOLD 2027 – When Design Creates Lasting Impact

Launched by Domus Academy in 2023, UNFOLD brings together design schools, students, educators and researchers from around the world to investigate contemporary challenges through design.

Taking place during Milan Design Week, it creates a space where education, research and experimentation converge, giving students the opportunity to present their work within an international context while enabling universities to exchange perspectives, methodologies and approaches to design education.

Through a shared annual theme, participating institutions contribute their own cultural and disciplinary perspectives to a collective exploration of design’s evolving role.

The theme of UNFOLD 2027, “Creating Ripples: Design for Amplifying Impact”, invites participants to explore how design can generate effects that extend beyond a single intervention. Like a ripple spreading from one point, a project can activate relationships, influence behaviours, enable new actions and connect local initiatives with wider systems, creating impact that evolves over time.

The theme is explored through three interconnected dimensions:

• Latency, revealing hidden or overlooked potential
• Modulation, designing solutions that can adapt and evolve in response to changing circumstances
• Resonance, amplifying connections and enabling ideas and practices to influence wider communities, organisations and contexts.

Through products, services, spaces, systems, experiences or collaborative processes, students are encouraged to look beyond immediate solutions and consider design as a means of revealing possibilities, enabling transformation and creating broader, longer-lasting impact.

UNFOLD combines three complementary formats, creating opportunities for both students and academics to present their work and exchange knowledge.

The UNFOLD Exhibition showcases selected student projects from participating universities, offering an international perspective on emerging design research and practice.

The UNFOLD Conference gives students a platform to present and discuss their projects, bringing different disciplines, cultures and approaches into dialogue around the annual theme.

Alongside it, the UNFOLD Symposium welcomes academics, researchers and educators to expand the conversation through perspectives on design research and education.

Together, these formats connect student experimentation with academic reflection, creating a shared space for dialogue during Milan Design Week.

For universities, joining UNFOLD means contributing to an international conversation on the future of design while giving students the opportunity to experience Milan Design Week from an active, participatory perspective.

Participating institutions can:

• showcase student projects and research internationally;
• connect students with peers from different countries and design cultures;
• exchange educational and research perspectives with other institutions;
• contribute to discussions around emerging challenges and the evolving role of design;
• build new academic connections and opportunities for future collaboration.

For students, UNFOLD offers the opportunity to move their work beyond the classroom, test ideas through international exchange and become part of a wider design community.

The UNFOLD 2027 Call for Participation is open to design schools and institutions worldwide; applications from individual students are not accepted.

Institutions interested in joining UNFOLD 2027 must fill in the Expression of Interest form here by 25 September 2026. Selected institutions will then be invited to develop their proposals for participation in the 2027 edition.

UNFOLD 2027 will take place during Milan Design Week, from 12 to 18 April 2027.