A postcard from Irish Design Week 2025

As it welcomed designers from around the world, Irish Design Week 2025 offered a distinctly homegrown approach. Now in its fourth year, the festival comprised over 65 events across multiple counties, from medtech innovation in Galway to experimental sound workshops in Limerick, fashion collaborations in Kerry to waste-plastic textile experiments in Cork.

The theme, The Ties that Tie and the Links that Link, is inspired by Kilkenny Design Workshops, which opened officially 60 years ago. Established as Ireland's first state design service and deliberately located outside Dublin to foster an independent community of designers and craftspeople, KDW modernised Irish craft while embedding a collaborative ethos that continues to shape the country's design culture: connective, anti-hierarchical, and deliberately broad in scope.

That breadth is visible not just in the range of events, but in the festival's foundational structure. Unlike the UK, where design and craft councils operate separately, Ireland's unified Design & Crafts Council oversees both. As Tom Watts, head of design for Irish Design Week, puts it: 'We have a very Irish take on design: a storytelling based model where it's particularly open and a very wide-lens view of what design is and can be.'

A model for creative collaboration

That openness extends to international collaboration. Irish Design Week has adopted the Design Diplomacy model from Helsinki Design Week, pairing Irish designers with international counterparts for intimate, curated conversations—which Watts describes as bringing 'curveballs' by asking embassies to select designers from their national communities.

The pairings span disciplines and continents: Irish designers meet peers from France, USA, Japan, Australia and Sweden working in fields from interior design to sound. A highlight is Laurent Ungerer, who recently designed the new visual identity for Notre Dame, leading Tabula, a walk-and-talk workshop exploring design in dialogue with heritage architecture across Trinity College Dublin, St. Mary's Cathedral in Limerick, and UCC in Cork.

Those ties reach back through time as well. To mark its anniversary, Irish Design Week is digitally republishing Nick Marchant and Jeremy Addis’s 1985 book on Kilkenny Design Workshops, the only account published while the workshops were in operation. Alongside the original account of the historical context that gave rise to them, the new edition includes a previously unpublished chapter called 'The Future', ironically missing from the 1985 release due to deadline pressures. A conference forming part of the programme provides a forum to discuss the ideas of that chapter, and predictions of what the next 20 years might look like.

Design and craft

Also returning to Kilkenny is Mary V Mullin, a founding member of what became the Design & Crafts Council Ireland, who went on to establish the Boilerhouse at the V&A with Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley (the precursor to London's Design Museum). She brings a collection of 130 artifacts, every one made in Kilkenny's castle yard, completing a geographic and temporal loop that embodies the festival's theme.

This commitment to preserving heritage craft extends to contemporary policy work. The Design & Crafts Council is collaborating with the European Commission on Geographical Indication (GI) protection for Irish craft—a designation that safeguards place-specific techniques and materials from global imitation.

'They see the value in having a GI and that their products are branded with a GI,' says Mary Blanchfield, CEO of the Design & Crafts Council Ireland. Connemara marble, Donegal tweed, and Carrickmacross lace are among the crafts being considered—each tied to specific regions and vulnerable to manufacturers elsewhere claiming their provenance. The work speaks to a broader Irish understanding: that craft authenticity isn't just about technique, but about the deep relationship between making and place.

Islands as models of circularity

Ireland's influence extends well beyond the island of Ireland. Concurrent to the festival week, the European Parliament is hosting a design policy conference in its new Dublin flagship building, signalling Ireland's role not just as a participant in European design discourse, but as a contributor shaping it.

Beyond native craftsmanship and raw materials, Ireland's contribution to the wider design world is also philosophical; an outlook honed by its island nature. Australian interior designer Banjo Beale, known for the BBC's Interior Design Masters and Designing the Hebrides brings discussion about islands as models of circularity to the festival.

'On an island, you don't have the option to throw things away,' Watts explains. 'There is this kind of mentality on islands about reusing and repairing and mending because you can't go to B&Q. You have to be resourceful.' Blanchfield adds: 'we have a saying: keep something for seven years and it'll find a use for it.'

Satellite events: Form & Fable

The festival's energy extends beyond the official program, with satellite events popping up, building on the momentum around Irish design. Form & Fable, a six-week pop-up curated by J Hill's Standard at Wilton Park in Dublin, brings together work from Irish makers across disciplines, from Mourne Textiles' handwoven pieces to Fermoyle Pottery ceramics and Sam Gleeson knives.

Ava Kelly, director of J Hill's Standard, notes the challenge many makers face: 'Many work from isolation in various beautiful parts of the island and it is always a big challenge to get the work before the public.'

Sixty years after Kilkenny Design Workshops embedded collaboration at the heart of Irish design, that ethos remains visible everywhere—from the unified council overseeing craft and design, to events activating across counties rather than concentrating in the capital, to international designers paired in intimate conversation. The ties that tie aren't just a theme; they're the method itself. Ireland's contribution to design isn't only in what it makes, but in how it thinks: connective and expansive in its definition of what design can be.