International Design Day 2026
27–30 April
Windhoek
Embedded Files
What happens between us matters.
What happens between us matters.
Design mediates the physical, digital, and emotional spaces where human connection is possible. It challenges us to facilitate genuine connection, not just efficiency, but the quality of human interaction.
Design mediates the physical, digital, and emotional spaces where human connection is possible. It challenges us to facilitate genuine connection, not just efficiency, but the quality of human interaction.
International Design Day (IDD) 2026, The Spaces In Between, invites designers to look beyond objects and outcomes and toward the shared experiences that shape how we belong, communicate, and coexist. Design lives in the in-between, the thresholds where ideas become experiences and strangers become communities.
International Design Day (IDD) 2026, The Spaces In Between, invites designers to look beyond objects and outcomes and toward the shared experiences that shape how we belong, communicate, and coexist. Design lives in the in-between, the thresholds where ideas become experiences and strangers become communities.
IDD for Windhoek
The Backstory
IDD for Windhoek
The Backstory
This year, Bellhaus Atelier & Galerie, Creative Industry Institute Africa, for.m.all, ENK Public Art, Neo Paints Namibia, and Turipamwe Design have partnered to co-create this experience for Windhoek.
We are taking this theme to the streets, exploring how design can bridge gaps in our urban navigation and social connections. We’re celebrating this year’s theme with a four-day programme that starts with a facilitated walking experiment and ends with a mural unveiling.
The Experience
A City. A Studio. A Space In Between.
The Experience
A City. A Studio. A Space In Between.
We’re inviting a small group of creative practitioners to step away from their desks, out of the studio, and into the city. This is a living design experience unfolding across Windhoek’s streets and within the Bellhaus Atelier.
We’re looking at Windhoek as a living scrapbook: a place where history, movement, and emotion overlap.
Together, we explore:
How people move
How encounters happen
How design shapes experience — often invisibly
Why This Matters Now
The Reason
Why This Matters Now
The Reason
We live in an age of constant communication and increasing disconnection. From our neighbourhoods to our networks, the spaces that bring people together are under pressure. Digital tools allow us to communicate instantly, yet many experience isolation, polarisation, and fatigue. Public spaces are contested. Shared systems are strained. Speed, scale, and efficiency often leave little room for care, listening, or nuance.
Design operates within these tensions.
Rather than offering simple solutions, The Spaces In Between encourages designers to ask deeper questions:
Where does connection truly happen in this system?
Where does it break down?
Who is included, and who is left navigating alone?
What assumptions are embedded in the spaces we design?
Design has the power to rebuild the spaces that bring people together. It shapes how we move through our cities, how we share ideas, how we care for one another, and how we imagine what comes next.
The Experience Overview
Detailed programme below
The Experience Overview
Detailed programme below
Day 1: Walk & Reflect
The City as Laboratory
Step into Windhoek’s CBD.
We walk, observe, document, and engage:
How do people move through space?
Where do connections happen — or break?
What do we notice when we slow down?
The city becomes a site of inquiry. Design begins with seeing.
From Observation to Insight
We return to Bellhaus after lunch to make sense of what we’ve seen.
Through guided reflection, mapping, and conversation, we translate lived experiences into shared understanding.
Patterns emerge.
Tensions surface.
Opportunities reveal themselves.
This is where the invisible becomes visible.
Day 2: Make
From Insight to Expression
Using collage and collaborative making, we transform insight into visual language. Fragments of the city, movement, memory, texture, feeling — come together as
a shared composition.
This becomes the blueprint for a 5m x 5m mural.
Ideas move from thought to form.
Design becomes tangible.
Day 3 & 4: Reveal
From Creation to Connection
The final mural is brought to life — together.
What began as an observation becomes a collective statement.
The week culminates in:
The mural unveiling
The exhibition is opening at Bellhaus
A moment to gather, reflect, and share what we’ve created.
What We Need From You
Your Participation
What We Need From You
Your Participation
We’re in search of curious, committed, and creative crew to join us for the four days. Ideally, participants who can join us throughout or on a given day with a meaningful contribution.
We’re in search of curious, committed, and creative crew to join us for the four days. Ideally, participants who can join us throughout or on a given day with a meaningful contribution.
Your Perspective: Whether you’re an architect looking at structure or a muralist looking at colour,
your unique lens is the data we need. All expertise and perspectives welcome.
Your Perspective: Whether you’re an architect looking at structure or a muralist looking at colour,
your unique lens is the data we need. All expertise and perspectives welcome.
Tools: A smartphone to upload any photos and audio to our shared drive during the walk, and a laptop
on Day 3 to digitise ideas.
Hands-on Energy: Be ready to move from design theory to practice on Monday, to getting paint on your hands by Wednesday.
Gear: Wear hats, protective clothing and sunblock. Also, bring your own water bottle for Monday walk lab.
What We Provide
Your Participation
What We Provide
Your Participation
All collaborators will receive feature credit in the final Mural Manifesto and exhibition communications.
Lunch and snacks will be provided for the Monday and Tuesday sessions, as will all necessary creative materials (paints, collage tools, etc.)
Whom Is This For
You?
Whom Is This For
You?
We invite anyone with a curious mind and willing hands to participate and co-create
The Spaces In Between. Contact us for more information.
Email us
for more detailed information
WhatsApp or call during office hours
+264 81 823 9669
Detailed Windhoek Programme
( Times subject to change )
Detailed Windhoek Programme
( Times subject to change )
Day 1 | The Walking Lab
Gathering Data (Discover + Define)
Participants will walk a defined route through the CBD to observe and record areas of connection and disconnection, noting sensory details and impressions in a field guide. The walk ends at the Bellhaus building. After lunch, the group will share their findings as mapped statements. These collective insights, facilitated by Turipamwe Design, will inspire the creative work on Day 2.
08h30 – 09h00
Welcome & Briefing with snacks at Bellhaus. (18 Bell Street, Grüner Kranz, Windhoek)
09h00 – 13h00
The Walking Lab, a facilitated walking experiment in a loop through the streets of Windhoek to discover
The Spaces In Between
13h00 – 14h00
Community lunch at Kin Table
14h00 – 16h00
Synthesis and reflection session
Your facilitators are:
Day 2 | Club Collage
The Blueprint (Define & Design)
Using collage as a medium and technique, we explore how to translate the data and impressions collected and synthesised from Monday’s sessions and findings into a visual representation. The collage is digitised and projected for the mural render.
This session is guided by Marcii Magson, with support from experienced mural artists to help us make the most of the experience.
09h00 – 12h00
Club collage to define and design The Spaces In Between. All materials are provided.
12h00 – 13h00
Community lunch at Kin Table
13h00 – 16h00
Mural digitalisation
Your facilitator is:
Day 3 | Mural Manifesto I
The Execution (Deliver)
The core experience is a collaborative 5x5-metre mural painting that fosters teamwork and leaves a tangible symbol for
IDD 2026. Guided through a facilitated painting process, participants receive technical guidance, best practices, and a clear structure from Emmanuel Enkara of ENK Public Art Group.
With colours from Neo Paints Namibia, not only is a high-quality final piece ensured, but individual creative energy is also translated into a cohesive, collectively crafted artwork.
08h30 – 17h00
Collaborative mural painting.
Your facilitator is:
Day 4 | Mural Manifesto II
The Reveal (Deliver)
We complete the mural and celebrate its public unveiling, which officially opens the exhibition.
08h30 – 15h00
Collaborative mural painting and final touches.
Brushes down at 15h:00
18h30 – 21h00
The reveal. Mural unveiling and exhibition opening of “The Pinnacle of the International: Architects of the Visual Language”
About The Exhibition
About The Exhibition
The Pinnacle Of The International: Architects of the Visual Language
A Transhistorical Palimpsest
Positioned within the broader International Design Day programme, the exhibition becomes a counterpoint to
the city: Where the Walking Design Lab observes the present, Bellhaus offers a space to contextualise, question, and translate those observations into a deeper understanding. It is both a point of arrival and a point of departure — a space where past, present, and future meet in the act of making meaning.
At the turn of the 20th century, a revolutionary movement began—an upheaval in art and design that tore down centuries of established norms and reimagined visual language from the ground up. This exhibition presents a rare collection of early works, concept sketches, and visionary archives by Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky, Georges Valmier, Willi Baumeister, Kazimir Malevich, and their contemporaries. These extraordinary pioneers forged the aesthetic tectonics that continue to shape graphic design’s genealogy and vibrate through our contemporary visual landscape.
The exhibition “The Pinnacle of the International: Architects of the Visual Language” unfolds as both archive and experience. Rather than presenting design as a fixed outcome, the exhibition invites visitors into a living dialogue across time, tracing how early pioneers of modern visual language shaped the way we communicate today. From abstraction and colour theory to typography and composition, these works reveal the foundations of contemporary design as we know it. But this is not a static display. The exhibition is conceived as a threshold space, a place to pause, reflect, and interpret. It asks visitors to look beyond form and consider how meaning is constructed, how visual systems influence perception, and how design continues to evolve through cultural exchange.
In collaboration with the museums of Denmark, Finland, Cleveland and Chicago under the Creative Commons Zero license, curated by Marcii Magson.
Visit www.bellhaus.art for more information about the exhibition.
International Design Day 2026, Windhoek
Official Colour Partner
Co-Created by
Bellhaus Atelier & Galerie | Creative Industry Institute Africa | for.m.all | ENK Public Art | Turipamwe Design
Page updated
Report abuse