Gentler Futures Festivalnow in its third year, took place on June 5 and 6, 2026, at the Mouraria Creative Hub, JAM Lisbon and Bio Lab Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal, a two-day gathering of designers, researchers, activists and creators working on what the festival organizers call. “Society-centered, life-centered, and planet-centered design.”
The language itself signals a departure from the industry’s dominant register, especially of recent design festivals. No brand installations here, no luxury consumer mood boards, no press rooms to rant about, just interesting conversations, innovative projects and chances to really think about reinventing how design works.
Gentler Futures Festival 2026 until the end of May © Eglė Duleckyte
Gentler Futures Festival 2026 until the end of May © Eglė Duleckyte
Gentler Futures Festival 2026 until the end of May © Eglė Duleckyte
Until the end of May the founders © Eglė Duleckyte
Gentler Futures Festival 2026 until the end of May © Eglė Duleckyte
Gentler Futures Festival 2026 until the end of May © Eglė Duleckyte
Gentler Futures Festival 2026 until the end of May © Eglė Duleckyte
Gentler Futures Festival:
Until the end of May
Gentler Futures is a non-profit initiative of hers Until the end of Maya research and design studio based in Lisbon. The practice circles questions that mainstream industry rarely asks, asking how we can reshape the way we make things. Their works looked at a variety of themes, such as exploring construction within cities rather than offshore, or how our relationship with objects would change if we knew the people, resources and ecological costs behind them. A key interest of both the studio and the festival is sustainability and designing for more than people, whether that comes through research into biomaterials, research into planting systems or post-consumer processing.
The festival is an extension of their research into public space. The 2026 line-up includes 49 participants in exhibitions, installations, performances, talks and workshops. The range is remarkable: for example, Interspecies Interneta project that explores communication and coexistence between humans and non-human animals, shares the program with Phyta Biodesignworking on abiotic architecture for living systems. Reasons for Care x Studio method hosts a workshop on soil regeneration through cooking, while Pousio organizes a show called “discovering rock paintings”, exploring a new symbolic language of the Alentejo cup signs.
Independent forms are rising
What Gentler Futures represents is part of a wider, uneven but present change happening on the fringes of the design world. Across Europe, small independent realities are proliferating, creating projects and events built not around the market but around discipline. Vienna Design Weekorganized by an independent association, it has catapulted the social and urban dimensions of design beyond the aesthetics of products. EDIT Naplesfounded by Domitilla Dardi and Emilia Petruccelli as a showcase for designer-makers and small manufacturers, it acts as an independent counterpoint to the Milanese companies located in the northern part of the country. In Stockholm, when the official Furniture Fair was cancelled, the independent Stockholm Creative Edition stepped into the void.
These events share some related characteristics. They are often small by choice, providing better curatorial practice. They tend to be embedded in the city rather than exhibition spaces, using existing urban spaces as meaningful spaces in their own right. They are often cheaper or free to visit, expanding access beyond the industry professionals and buyers who traditionally guard the design conversation.
Production of disciplinary value
The mainstream design industry’s relationship with sustainability has become a credibility problem: greenwashing is endemic, material claims are difficult to verify, and there are fundamental contradictions between emission trends toward luxury and their ecological footprints. Gentler Futures works because it is a demonstration built to challenge and improve the design discipline at its core, not just sell it out. Having practices that do not usually depend on product logic, such as biomaterials research, speculative performance, or cross-species work, can actually enrich the mainstream discipline directly by providing exposure to new ways of behaving and thinking.
Gentler Futures Festival and Until the end of May they help create a vocabulary, a set of references, and a professional network for designers who want design to mean something different than it currently does to most of the world. To sum it up in their own words, “In a society that wants the future to be faster, brighter, smarter, leaner, sharper, more convenient, more profitable, more high-tech and more automated, let’s go kinder.”
