Frame questions
Design can reveal assumptions, relationships, and possibilities that conventional problem definitions leave unseen.
Program
ADW Future Design Scholars Program
Established by the Asia Design Week Committee in 2026, the ADW Future Design Scholars Program supports emerging scholars and research-led practitioners whose work connects design with technology, culture, education, society, and related fields.
Through its annual Fellowship, academic exchange, publications, public programs, and international network, the Program creates opportunities for original research to develop, circulate, and contribute to wider scholarly and public conversations.
Why now
Design has become a meeting place for new forms of knowledge.
Many of the most consequential questions of our time sit between established disciplines. Technology changes culture; ecological choices are also material, institutional, and social choices; and new forms of intelligence are changing creative agency itself.
Asia Design Week created the Program to give researchers time, resources, and an international context in which to examine these questions through design. The aim is not to dissolve disciplinary difference, but to support work in which distinct forms of knowledge can meet around a question that matters.
Design-led research
Design is part of the inquiry, not an added layer of presentation
Projects may be theoretical, historical, technological, material, social, cultural, or practice-based.
Connect knowledge
It can organize exchange among technical, cultural, social, and experiential forms of understanding.
Test possibilities
Models, prototypes, experiments, and situated practice can make an argument tangible and open to examination.
Create public knowledge
Research can travel through publications, exhibitions, archives, films, tools, educational models, and public programs.
Program Overview
How the Program works
ADW Future Design Scholars Program
A long-term platform for design-led interdisciplinary research, international academic exchange, and scholar development.
ADW Future Design Fellowship
The Program’s annual funding initiative, providing up to 12 months of support for selected research projects.
ADW Future Design Scholar
A Fellowship recipient and member of the Program’s international scholarly community.
Core principles
What the Program is built to sustain
Independent inquiry
Design-led knowledge
Interdisciplinary exchange
Cultural plurality
Public knowledge
Annual cycle
Fellowship, research period, and public exchange.
- Open CallApplications and host-environment planning
- SelectionAcademic review, interview where needed, and award coordination
- ResearchUp to 12 months of approved independent work
- ExchangeScholarly dialogue, research translation, and future Program activities
2026 ADW Future Design Fellowship
2026 Selection in Progress. The official Fellowship page remains the canonical record of the 2026 cycle.
View the 2026 Fellowship