The first Landmark Project is a pavilion by Studio Saar and Atelier One, built as a bamboo grid shell and canopied with traditional Indian cane police shields, layered over with knups — the woven rain shields farmers use in north-eastern India. Objects made for confrontation, restacked into a roof that makes shade and asks people to sit down under it. The reference point is the pangolin, the most trafficked mammal in the world, and the subject is colonial legacy, extraction and the movement of bodies across borders. It sits on a pedestrianised street behind the Indian High Commission, near the bust of Nehru. Studio Saar was founded by Ananya Singhal and works between the UK and India. Atelier One, led by Neil Thomas, did the structural engineering on Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate. If you only get one afternoon, spend it here.

The V&A remains the anchor. This year's programme is co-curated by Carrie Chan and Kristian Volsing and threads through the galleries rather than sitting in one room, which is the correct way to use that building and the wrong way to see it in an hour. Work from Henry Svendsen, Sam Ghantous, Andre Williams, Nina Davies and Albert Yonathan Setyawan, with new commissions from Aziza Kadyri, Eunjo Lee and Playfool, the V&A's Emerging Designer for 2026. Sound, identity, ecology, AI. Go early. Go on a weekday.

Built in 1890, closed to the public for thirteen years, opening for the Festival under the custodianship of the Glass Castle Foundation. L-Acoustics is staging The Art of Sound inside it, including a twenty-minute spatial audio commission from Max Cooper called Feeling is Structure, reworked from a piece originally made for the Royal Albert Hall. The building would be worth the trip on its own. The programming is a bonus.

The one for anyone who has ever tried to photograph the Barbican and failed to make the concrete look as good as it does in person. MADE has gone into the Barbican archives and the work of Miriam Howitt, and come out with a 23-piece interiors collection: furniture, lighting, textiles, accessories. There is an installation at the Barbican for the Festival, and the collection is in stores from August. Archive-led collaborations are usually a mood board with a price list attached. This one has a specific designer and a specific building behind it, which is a better starting point than most.

Sun Media Group brings over sixty artisans and designers from China and elsewhere to Somerset House, curated by Su Dan of the Chinese Traditional Culture Museum with Yang Lan. Three sections: Clear the Mind, Nourish the Mind, Refine the Mind. Ambitious in scale and the single largest craft proposition in the programme.

Second edition, and the pairings are the point. International designers matched with craftspeople from Japan's Tokai region across lacquer, metal, wood, ceramic, washi and textile. Fushi is the headline: a Mino Yaki ceramic console and lighting piece by Yohei Ito, third-generation head of the Fudogama kiln, with Australian industrial designer David Caon. Elsewhere, Bethan Laura Wood works with Suzusan's Hiroyuki Murase on Kataginu. Philippe Malouin and Ando Cloisonne's Shigeyuki Ando make Kasane. Lanzavecchia + Wai pair with Warabi Paper Company for Grid Unwoven, and Atang Tshikare works with kumihimo specialist Tomoyuki Matsuda on Yamollo.

NIGO: From Japan with Love is the first retrospective on the KENZO artistic director, and the first serious museum treatment of the streetwear-to-luxury pipeline in London. PLATFORM this year features Simone Brewster, with a guided tour from curator Hadeel Eltayeb on 12 September. On 15 September there is a panel on design practice and motherhood with Brewster, Laxmi Hussein, Emefa Cole and Hettie Judah, which is overdue and worth putting in the diary.

The Conran Shop is running three exhibitions across the building at 16 Sloane Square, which makes it the most efficient hour of the week. Basement, ground and first, all under one roof, all worth the stairs. Motion Sickness, in the basement, is Isabel + Helen. Isabel Gibson and Helen Chesner met studying graphic design at Chelsea College of Arts and have worked together since 2012, making kinetic installations and animated sculptures for Hermès, Bottega Veneta, Moncler, Tate Modern and the V&A. This is a decade of studio practice laid out: movement, materials and mechanisms, worked out by hand and on purpose without a screen in sight. Their process is tinkering until something behaves unexpectedly, then keeping the accident. Graphic, funny, and the show most likely to hold a child's attention for longer than four minutes. JIG Studio takes the ground and first floor with six Brazilian designers and artists across collectible furniture, lighting and sculpture. JIG is the Soho gallery at 25 Lexington Street, opened in October 2025 by architect Richard Penman and design strategist Grace Nemeth and developed with the Brazilian Embassy, dedicated entirely to contemporary Brazilian collectible design. Its own framing is worth repeating: Brazilian design as cultural exchange rather than export, restraint over spectacle. A corrective to the way Brazilian modernism usually reaches London, which is as a Sergio Rodrigues reissue and a price. Thresholds, also on the ground and first floor, is curated by Stella Smith, founder of Izena, who works across art and collectible design. The premise is the threshold as a site of transformation, which is a curatorial idea that can go either way. Smith's track record suggests it goes the right way.

ND Selects is a curated showcase by New Designers dedicated to shining a light on new businesses in the design industry. It provides a curated view of products just hitting the market from new businesses 1-5 years in, allowing people to explore the latest design trends. For the first time, ND Selects will take place outside of the main July event, presented in collaboration with Shoreditch Design Week. Glassette brand OINK will be showing as part of this.