As London Design Festival 2026 brings together designers, artists and architects across the capital, Es Devlin appears at the festival with a practice that moves between art, architecture, performance and design.
London Design Festival returns from 12 to 20 September 2026, bringing exhibitions, installations, talks and projects to venues and design districts across London. Among the programme’s prominent speakers is British artist and designer Es Devlin, who delivered the closing keynote on the first day of the Global Design Forum at the Victoria and Albert Museum on 12 September.
In conversation with London Design Festival co-founder and director Ben Evans, Devlin discussed a practice shaped by collaboration and experimentation, and explored how technology, performance and spatial design can create new ways of seeing and imagining the world.
Devlin’s appearance at the festival reflects the increasingly fluid boundaries of contemporary design. Her work moves across art, architecture, theatre, music and technology, creating environments in which the audience is not simply a spectator but an active part of the experience.
Beyond the object
Devlin’s career began in theatre, where she developed a distinctive approach to stage design. Over time, her practice expanded into sculpture, public art and large-scale installations, bringing the language of performance into museums, galleries and public spaces.
Her work often combines light, sound, architecture, movement and text. Rather than treating these elements separately, Devlin brings them together to create environments that change according to the way people move through them.
This interest in the audience remains central to her practice. In a 2026 interview with V&A East, Devlin described her work as being rooted in the audience, explaining that the questions guiding her practice are how a work will make her feel and how it will make the audience, viewer or visitor feel.
Image credit: Photography by Sophia Bennett ©Michelangelo Foundation
The Everythingists at V&A East
Devlin’s connection with London Design Festival comes at a particularly relevant moment in her London practice.
At V&A East Storehouse, her installation The Everythingists is currently on view as part of the institution’s New Work commissions. The 15-metre-wide illuminated sculpture brings together dancing figures, architectural forms, light, sound and voice.
The work was created in dialogue with Natalia Goncharova’s monumental The Firebird backcloth, which was made for Sergei Diaghilev’s 1926 Ballets Russes production of The Firebird. Devlin’s response considers East London through relationships between bodies, movement and the structures that shape everyday life.
The relationship between the two works is deliberately physical. Visitors can sit between Goncharova’s The Firebird and The Everythingists, moving their attention from one work to the other. The arrangement creates a conversation between two works separated by a century.
The Everythingists is on view at V&A East Storehouse until 18 October 2026.
From London Design Festival to the Design Museum
Devlin’s presence at London Design Festival also precedes a major institutional presentation of her work.
On 2 October 2026, the Design Museum will open Es Devlin: Other Worlds, the first retrospective in Europe celebrating her 30-year creative practice across sculpture, stage design, music, language and light. The exhibition will bring together artworks, installations and film, alongside the largest presentation of Devlin’s archive to date.
Among the exhibition’s highlights is a detailed replica of Devlin’s London studio, containing books, objects and maquettes that offer an insight into the research and development behind her work.
The retrospective will run until 4 April 2027, extending the conversation around Devlin’s practice beyond London Design Festival and placing three decades of her work within a broader history of contemporary design.
Designing experiences
What makes Devlin particularly relevant to the current design landscape is the way her work challenges the idea of design as something that exists solely as an object.
Her projects can function as sculptures, stages, architectural environments and public gatherings at the same time. They are designed not only to be looked at, but to be experienced.
That approach is particularly visible in The Everythingists, where the relationship between sculpture, sound, movement, architecture and the visitor becomes part of the work itself. It is also central to the wider trajectory of Devlin’s practice, which has increasingly moved between disciplines rather than remaining within the traditional boundaries of stage or object design.
Her appearance at London Design Festival 2026 therefore offers an opportunity to look at design from a wider perspective: not simply as the creation of things, but as a way of shaping how people encounter places, ideas and one another.
For Es Devlin, the space between disciplines is not a limitation. It is where the work begins.
Es Devlin’s keynote took place on 12 September 2026 as part of the Global Design Forum at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Es Devlin: Other Worlds opens at the Design Museum in London on 2 October 2026 and runs until 4 April 2027.