2025 Theme: Reform

In partnership with Pact Studio

Submit a Community Event Proposal for 2025

Welcome to the 19th Edition of San Francisco Design Week, where we invite your participation with the guiding theme: Reform.

The Bay area has long been at the forefront of thought leadership and influence through design and innovation. As we continue to shape the future, we have an opportunity to investigate our relationship to past and present, and our power to reform processes, structures, materials, beliefs, behaviors and systems that have the potential to impact society and culture.

This year’s theme, “Reform”, created in partnership with Pact Studio, is an invitation to examine ideas of change. How do we know when something needs to be reformed? Does it need an incremental update or a complete overhaul? Do we understand the problem well enough to create a meaningful solution? What are the long term impacts of making or not making a change? Join us June 2–10, 2025, for a city-wide festival of events and conversations dedicated to exploring how to reshape outcomes with conscious design.

The Reform Theme

Designers shape tomorrow’s reality with the decisions we make today. Our work – whether crafting interfaces, spaces, products, or experiences – doesn’t just solve problems; it fundamentally reshapes how humans interact, behave, and thrive. This power to modify our world carries both extraordinary opportunity and with that, an extraordinary responsibility. Reform needs to be informed, which means asking lots of questions and thinking long term.

Just like reform, this year’s modular design is all about shaping and reshaping. It folds and unfolds, blends and builds into an ever-changing system that represents all different inputs, parts, and pieces that are shifting, changing, and creating synergy in the truest definition of the word.

“Design is a delicate balance between transformation and preservation,” says Natalia Kowaleczko, Founder and Creative Lead of Pact Studio. “While the impulse for improvement is natural, we must distinguish between constructive evolution and destructive upheaval. How do we, as designers, embrace our role as agents of meaningful change? When is it intentional reform and when is it just wrecking or dismantling things? Is what we’re doing fixing the core of the problem or is it just a band-aid? How do we create the most benefit for all, for the longest time possible?”

“True design leadership requires not just identifying what needs to change, but understanding deeply what’s still working, what should carry on,” adds Tony Mingo, Partner at Pact. “Design becomes not just a process of creation, but a careful negotiation between progress and stability, between bold vision and practical wisdom, between individual brilliance and collective well-being. I think too often we mistake movement for progress.”

“When it comes to sustainability, for instance, we’ve been at the point of reckless consumption for too long.” says Michelle Weed, Messaging Lead. “We have the power to design the world we want to live in. With forethought and intention, it is possible to create forward progress while finding equilibrium.”