About us
Birmingham Design is an organisation dedicated to supporting the city’s budding creative community.
From organising events to connecting designers with people that matter our mission is to help the West Midlands become the creative powerhouse it deserves to be.
Our history
Founded in 2017, Birmingham Design Festival was created by Brum based designers Daniel Alcorn and Luke Tonge to add a much needed flagship design event to the local calendar.
In 2018 the first festival launched to great critical success with some of the best designers from around the world featuring in a packed 100 event programme, helping to strengthen the city’s reputation as a design powerhouse and establish a desire to see more events like it.
Since then the festival has grown from strength-to-strength. Every June the global design community descends on Birmingham for our annual celebration of creativity.
Since 2022, BDF has alternated between a Festival and Conference format. The Festival continues our tradition of an expansive, city wide experience – 3 days, 100 speakers, multiple venues. In Conference years we focus our energy into two days, a day of talks and a day of workshops held in one venue. It’s a more condensed version of the festival – but just as exciting.
Outside of our showpiece event in June, Birmingham Design supports the design community year-round. Throughout the year we put on events, markets, work-placements, artistic commissions and much more. We have have a shop, selling design books, stationery and more
Past festivals
Previous speakers
Meet the team
Birmingham Design Festival was founded by Brum based designers Daniel Alcorn and Luke Tonge, who continue to curate the festival and other activities produced by Birmingham Design.
Every year the festival is supported generously by a small planning team, a slightly larger delivery team and over 100 volunteers.
The planning team for 2025 is Daniel Alcorn, Luke Tonge, Sammy Ha, Lindsay Baker, Lisa Barratt, Dan Silverstone, Emily Caplan, Rosie Field, Winnie Nip, Rosie Clarke and Shiv Palmer.
