Running from January 23 to February 1, 2026, the DesignTO Design Festival returns to Toronto for its 16th edition. The 2026 edition presents over 100 free exhibitions, installations, talks, and workshops throughout the city. This year, the Festival poses a simple yet important question: What does it mean to belong? To belong to one another, to our cities, to our histories, to the materials and spaces around us, and to the futures we aspire to create. What does it mean?

Discover DesignTO 2025

Featuring work by hundreds of artists and designers, the Design Festival explores questions of identity through a wide range of perspectives, including queer domesticity, diasporic memory, ancestral craft, urban advocacy, ecological futures, and the visceral act of making.

Positioning Toronto as a living laboratory of ideas, the Festival brings together materials, memories, and communities, using design as a means of storytelling and exchange. With neighbourhood activations planned across Kensington Market, Roncesvalles, Yonge + St. Clair, Trinity Bellwoods, Stackt Market, 401 Richmond, and along the Waterfront, the Festival grounds global conversations within Toronto’s layered histories, vibrant communities, and thriving maker ecosystem.

Discover IDS – Toronto Interior Design 2025

“We’re thrilled to present another Festival that pushes beyond conventional definitions of design,” says Deborah Wang, DesignTO’s Artistic Director and Curator. “It reminds us that design is something we live within, create collectively, and experience emotionally.”

To date, DesignTO has welcomed more than one million visitors, reached 2.6 billion people through media coverage, showcased over 7,000 artists and designers, and generated $159 million in tourism spending. This results established its place as one of the most significant design events of the year.

DesignTO Launch Party

The Festival officially begins with the DesignTO Launch Party at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), an evening celebrating art, architecture, design, and global diasporic culture.

Guests will enjoy three floors of Jeff Wall Photographs 1984 – 2023, alongside music curated by local·global, featuring DJs Isabel Okoro and Adeola Abegunde.

Discover Design Shanghai 2026

Highlights at Design Festival in Toronto 2026

The Festival features over 100 exhibitions, installations, and events, taking place citywide. Here, following, there’s a selection of must-see moments. Advance registration may be required; a full list is available here.

Identity, Memory, and Cultural Storytelling

TO ·BE·LONGING: Portraits of Queer Living: An immersive spatial exploration by Quan Thai that challenges rigid domestic norms, reimagining queer home as a space of fluidity, chosen family, and everyday resilience.

Remnants for the Future: A poetic textile installation by Yana Rzayeva reflecting on diasporic hybridity, ancestral craft, and the traces that persist across generations.

Knot: Holding On: Artist Alanoud Emaish (noudiee) weaves Palestinian memory, inherited narratives, and tactile nostalgia into intimate archives of longing and cultural continuity.

Traces: A group exhibition examining migration, forced displacement, and the burden of preserving culture and identity. This multidisciplinary presentation includes sculpture, installation, cyanotypes, geographic maps, furniture, and textiles by Hangama Amiri, Sonny Assu, Meena Chowdhury, Nilojan Jegatheeswaran, Jenn Kitagawa, Dennis Lin, Rose Nordin, Anahita Norouzi, Waard Ward, and Abhishek Wagle.

Architecture and the Built Environment

How Heavy is a Building?: A film investigating the hidden material, cultural, and environmental weight of architecture. Created by Ha/f Climate Design and Make Good Projects, the film traces the embodied carbon of three iconic cultural institutions in Lisbon.

Ideas Forum: Advocating for a Better City: Five rapid-fire presentations—20 slides shown for 20 seconds each – highlighting diverse advocacy approaches and case studies within Toronto’s built environment.

Signs of Change: Pedaal: A project inviting the public to envision how cycling and urban landscapes may evolve in response to changing climate conditions, technologies, and public policy.

Art and Architecture Trivia Night: Hosted by the Toronto Society of Architects (TSA), this lively evening invites participants to join solo or in teams for an entertaining mix of fun, laughter, and learning.

Craft, Materials, and Maker Culture

All Light: A multidisciplinary group exhibition celebrating the creativity, material exploration, and technical innovation of Canada’s local maker community through ceramics, glass, textiles, wood, and metal.

An Evening of Craft, Digitality, and Critical Reflection: A program exploring how technology intersects with traditional craft practices through the community initiative Fábrica de Artes y Oficios.

DesignTO Talks: Within the Weave: A dialogue reflecting on material practice as storytelling, examining how repetition and irregularity, familiarity and abstraction, translate the landscapes we inhabit.

Kensington Unearthed and (Re)formed: An exhibition of ceramic works created from wild clay sourced in Toronto’s Kensington Market.

Soft Grid: Shao-Chi Lin merges traditional craft with contemporary techniques to create a contemplative textile installation at Le Germain Hotel Toronto, inviting visitors to slow down, observe, and experience a sense of belonging.

Eye-Catching Exhibitions

Beneath One Sky: Through open, overlapping cloud-like forms, Asli Alin’s artwork celebrates multiplicity, exchange, and shared belonging, proposing that true pride emerges from embracing diversity.

Suspended Vessels: Bram Locknick’s luminous installation transforms The Drake Hotel’s window into a glowing field of hand-blown glass and spectral light. Clusters of free-blown uranium glass droplets emit an eerie green glow under ultraviolet illumination, radiating across the façade and into the winter night.

Flourish: A responsive light fixture programmed to react to local light conditions, mirroring the natural rhythms of its surroundings. Created by 3K1D and Hot Pop Factory, the installation blends heritage and innovation, uniting technology and tradition in a moment shaped by both past and present.

The Weather Holds: This exhibition presents Teston + Zhang’s experimental explorations of space-making with air and water, alongside speculative yet grounded public designs. The show features six tangible design outcomes, including simulations, milli-fluidic prototypes, DIY drip cooling, thermal drapes, and mock-up installations.

DesignTO, various locations, Toronto, January 23-February 1, 2026

DesignTO is a design festival open to the general public
Size: 100 events, 500 exhibitors, designers and artists, 200,000 visitors in 2025
Visit website DesignTo.org for more info on venues and exhibitions