How can design generate effects that extend beyond a single project, place or moment?
This question is at the heart of UNFOLD 2027, Domus Academy’s international initiative dedicated to design education and research, returning during Milan Design Week 2027.
Following an edition that brought together 20 design universities worldwide, the new Call for Participation invites institutions to explore Creating Ripples: Design for Amplifying Impact and submit their Expression of Interest by 25 September 2026.
WHAT IS UNFOLD?
Launched by Domus Academy in 2023, UNFOLD brings together design schools, students, educators and researchers from around the world to investigate contemporary challenges through design.
Taking place during Milan Design Week, it creates a space where education, research and experimentation converge, giving students the opportunity to present their work within an international context while enabling universities to exchange perspectives, methodologies and approaches to design education.
Through a shared annual theme, participating institutions contribute their own cultural and disciplinary perspectives to a collective exploration of design’s evolving role.
UNFOLD 2027 THEME: CREATING RIPPLES
The theme of UNFOLD 2027, “Creating Ripples: Design for Amplifying Impact”, invites participants to explore how design can generate effects that extend beyond a single intervention. Like a ripple spreading from one point, a project can activate relationships, influence behaviours, enable new actions and connect local initiatives with wider systems, creating impact that evolves over time.
The theme is explored through three interconnected dimensions:
Latency, revealing hidden or overlooked potential
Modulation, designing solutions that can adapt and evolve in response to changing circumstances
Resonance, amplifying connections and enabling ideas and practices to influence wider communities, organisations and contexts.
Through products, services, spaces, systems, experiences or collaborative processes, students are encouraged to look beyond immediate solutions and consider design as a means of revealing possibilities, enabling transformation and creating broader, longer-lasting impact.
The UNFOLD 2027 Call for Participation is open to design schools and institutions worldwide; applications from individual students are not accepted.
Institutions interested in joining UNFOLD 2027 must fill in the Expression of Interest form here by 25 September 2026. Selected institutions will then be invited to develop their proposals for participation in the 2027 edition.
UNFOLD 2027 will take place during Milan Design Week, from 12 to 18 April 2027.
