Overview NYCxDESIGN is New York City's official design week: for seven days in May, showrooms, studios, galleries, piers and plazas across the five boroughs run exhibitions, talks, tours and receptions on one citywide calendar, and in 2025 2,121 businesses put events on it. Programming runs in nine tracks, from architecture, interiors and industrial design to graphic design, landscape and urban design, with technology, art and entertainment each crossed with design. The festival is run by a nonprofit of the same name, and 2025 was its 13th edition; in 2026 its board included Pentagram partner Eddie Opara and Anita Cooney, founding dean of Pratt's School of Design. On site The 2026 week, themed "Design Connects Us," put SHINE, a waterfront show of lighting objects by about 70 designers curated by Harry Allen, at the Seaport, while ICFF and WANTED filled the Javits Center and the Afternoon Light Design Fair took downtown WSA. Cornell Tech hosted a full-day Future Now AI Summit with a keynote from Phil Gilbert, formerly head of design at IBM, and panelists from Adobe, Google DeepMind and the MIT Media Lab. A keynote runs every day of the festival, an opening party starts the week, and the NYCxDESIGN Awards are handed out at a live ceremony, hosted in 2026 by Interior Design editor-in-chief Cindy Allen. Design Pavilion puts free public installations on plazas, parks and piers; in 2023 llLab hung a bamboo cloud over lower Manhattan. Audience It is a trade week with a public side: Design Pavilion is free and open to all, while the keynotes, the opening party and live podcast recordings are ticketed, and talks are recorded in front of invited guests from the NYCxDESIGN network. In 2025, 37% of attendees came from outside New York, up from 31% in 2024. Visitors plan their route in the festival app launched in 2025, which saves events into a personal itinerary with maps, in Bloomberg Connects, and in GRID, the printed festival guide, which ran 25,000 copies that year. Track record 2024: more than 280 events in all five boroughs, over 1,000 New York designers presenting and 225-plus press articles. 2025: 255-plus events, 256-plus articles and 400,757 website visits. Each year NYCxDESIGN commissions its own exhibitions; in 2025, NYCxDESIGNxSouvenir asked more than 72 New York designers to make a souvenir object for the city. Brand presence Lexus presented Design Pavilion at Hudson Yards in 2025 and in 2026 ran Sketch to Street, a multi-day studio in Times Square moving from sketch to finished car, canvas and fashion. Interior Design magazine presents the Awards, and Cool Hunting partnered on the 2024 souvenir exhibition. A brand can take one of the daily keynotes, co-produce an exhibition, talk, tour or reception in its own space, underwrite the opening party, the GRID guide or the Ode to NYC poster series, whose sales fund the Emerging Designer Showcase. Pavilion exhibitors design, fabricate and produce their own installations.