Tom Dixon at Shed 10: the 2026 Design Conference

The Design Conference closed New Zealand Design Week 2026 on Tuesday 10 March at Shed 10, and it was our hero ticket. A single stage, a full day, and a programme that moved from the local to the international and back, worth 50 CPD points for the professionals in the room. It opened, as the whole festival did, on tikanga and a welcome, before handing the day to the theme we had been building all week: People + Place.

From Whanganui to the world

The morning set the coordinates. It opened with UNESCO on Aotearoa’s Design Identity: From Whanganui to the World, a fitting start given Whanganui is New Zealand’s only UNESCO City of Design. Vincent Lowe, formerly Global Art Director for Nike Running, followed with The Global Blueprint, on designing place and purpose for iconic brands, the international perspective looking back at us. Kyoko and Idyllic brought the day down to the granular and urgent with Digital Carbon Footprint, on designing for a greener web, a reminder that place now includes the places we cannot see.

Tom Dixon takes the stage

The afternoon belonged to the headliner. Tom Dixon, the internationally acclaimed British designer known for his sculptural lighting and furniture, gave The Industrial Aesthetic: Challenging Models of Design and Manufacture. His presence was the clearest marker of how far our international profile has come in three editions, a global name on a wharf in Tāmaki Makaurau, talking about how things get made. It is the kind of booking we would have found hard to imagine at our first festival two years ago.

Grounding it back in place

The day did not end on the imported name. A session on Designing the Social City took on regeneration, art and the human experience of a city, and Briar Hickling, co-founder of Linehouse, closed the programme with Crafting Place: Design Grounded in Culture, Craft, and Community. The shape was deliberate: open on identity, reach out to the world through Nike and Tom Dixon, then return to craft, culture and community. The conference then rolled into the Lexus evening soirée, our Presenting Partner closing the festival’s biggest day.

Held under People + Place, the conference made its argument by structure as much as content. We refused to treat the local and the international as a hierarchy. Whanganui and Tom Dixon shared a stage, and the day was better for insisting they belonged on the same one.