Future Design Studies
Design theory, history, criticism, methods, education, and emerging research frameworks.
Design as a catalyst for interdisciplinary inquiry and new public possibilities.
The ADW Future Design Scholars Program supports researchers whose work expands how design contributes to knowledge, technological development, cultural understanding, and social transformation.
A research initiative for the expanding role of design in a changing world.
Design increasingly operates where established disciplines meet: between technology and human judgment, cultural continuity and social change, material systems and ecological responsibility, specialist knowledge and public experience. Its value lies not only in creating objects or services, but in framing questions, translating complexity, and enabling different forms of knowledge to work together.
Asia Design Week established the ADW Future Design Scholars Program to give emerging researchers the time, institutional setting, and international context needed to pursue this work with depth. The program welcomes scholarship grounded in theory or practice, and recognizes prototypes, exhibitions, films, publications, archives, methods, and public programs as legitimate forms of research contribution.
The inaugural 2026 ADW Future Design Fellowship will support a number of scholars undertaking independent research with a recognized university, research institute, laboratory, or academic host organization.
Learn more about the open call2026 Annual Theme
Design Beyond Boundaries
We are living through a period in which established boundaries are being continuously redefined. Artificial intelligence, digital media, biotechnology, and climate change are transforming how people understand the world, create new possibilities, and organize society. As technological, cultural, and social questions become increasingly interconnected, conventional disciplinary boundaries and isolated models of innovation are no longer sufficient to address the complexity of our time.
Under the 2026 theme, Design Beyond Boundaries, Asia Design Week invites emerging scholars from design, science, technology, art, the humanities, and social innovation to reconsider the role of design in shaping change. Moving beyond boundaries means more than crossing academic disciplines. It also means reconnecting technology with culture, research with practice, individual creativity with public value, and local knowledge with global futures.
Convergence
Convergence does not eliminate differences between fields; it creates the conditions from which new questions, methods, and forms of knowledge can emerge.
Creativity
Creativity extends beyond the production of new forms and products to include how people develop new capacities for imagination and action with intelligent systems, communities, and complex environments.
Sustainable Futures
Sustainable futures move beyond environmental concerns alone to consider whether technological, cultural, social, and institutional innovation can generate lasting, inclusive, and responsible impact.
What We Seek
The 2026 Fellowship welcomes original, experimental, and publicly meaningful research. Proposed projects may engage with artificial intelligence and human-AI collaboration, creative technologies and emerging forms of interaction, cultural and educational innovation, public and social design, materials and fabrication, ecological transition, or other questions reshaping how people may live and create in the future.
We seek projects that combine intellectual depth with the capacity to open new possibilities through design inquiry, technological prototypes, public dialogue, and situated practice. In this context, design is not only a means of solving existing problems, but also a way of crossing boundaries, connecting diverse forms of knowledge, and collectively creating futures that do not yet exist.
2026 Cycle - Key Dates
Application Period
March 1 - May 31, 2026
Review Period
June 1 - June 14, 2026
Admission Notice
Late June 2026
Support Confirmation
Following final award terms
Fellowship Start
From September 1, 2026
Research Scope
The program welcomes research across design theory and practice, human-AI collaboration, creative technology, sustainability, cultural knowledge, and public forms of scholarship.
Design Intelligence and Human-AI Co-Creation
Human-AI collaboration, design reasoning, creative computing, and intelligent design tools.
Creative Technology and Experience Systems
Interaction, spatial computing, media art, digital culture, and experience design.
Sustainable Design and Social Impact
Sustainable systems, public design, community innovation, and social transformation.
Cross-Cultural Design and Cultural Creativity
Cultural knowledge, creative industries, communication, and international exchange.
Research Prototypes and Public Knowledge
Research-driven prototypes, exhibitions, public scholarship, and knowledge visualization.
What the Program Supports
The fellowship is designed around the conditions that sustained, independent research requires.
Time for Inquiry
A one-year period in which scholars can develop a substantial question beyond the limits of short project cycles.
Independent Scholarship
Scholars retain intellectual responsibility for their work and pursue it within an appropriate host environment.
Multiple Research Forms
Written scholarship may be developed alongside prototypes, exhibitions, films, archives, tools, or public programs.
International Exchange
Research can enter wider conversations through Asia Design Week's academic, cultural, and professional networks.
Long-Term Purpose
The program aims to strengthen design scholarship as a field that is intellectually rigorous, materially engaged, culturally aware, and open to collaboration across disciplines. It is intended to help promising researchers develop work with relevance beyond a single institution, profession, or national context.
Over time, ADW Future Design Scholars will form a network of researchers contributing new concepts, methods, and public resources to the evolving practice of design.