Belfast Design Week is an annual multidisciplinary design festival celebrating design in Northern Ireland and beyond. We began BDW in 2015 with our first festival as part of the Year of Irish Design and have since gone on to deliver hundreds of events such as talks, workshops, conferences, pop ups, tours, exhibitions & more. Alongside this, we have worked on several “special projects” such as podcasts, publications, competitions and local and international collaborations.

Our largest festival took place in 2019, pre-pandemic; we had around 100 events taking place all across Belfast including UX Design panels, running Family Design Days and setting up a hub in The Butcher’s Building in Smithfield Market. When the pandemic lockdown measures were in place, we continued our work online and also delivered podcasts and an external pop up design museum that appeared in windows and walls across Belfast city centre.

We have been lucky to work on some amazing projects over the past few years including a visit to Vietnamese artisans with the British Council and Kilomet 109, a pilot project for the general public to grow their own plants and produce with Belfast 2024, a design collaboration in Hong Kong for wellbeing and pop up museums with the RE[act] Festival (Sustainability) and Irish Design Week (The ties that tie and the links that link).

Since we started, we have run our festival each November, but this year we are emerging at a different time of the year and running the festival from 01-07 May 2026. To reflect this, we have selected “Season” as this year’s theme and you can find out more here.

We would love for you to participate in BDW26 -whether that’s through attending, submitting or sponsoring events. So please sign up, get involved or get in touch.

We are your design community!

Belfast Design Week is currently co-run by Blick Shared Studios & Karishma’s World.

If you would like to get in touch with us, please contact info@belfastdesignweek.com

Image: BDW Pop Up Museum 2025 by Joe Laverty.