NYCxDESIGN

NYCxDESIGN is an annual design festival in Brooklyn, NY. Founded in 2012 as a City Council initiative, it coordinates hundreds of independently hosted events across all five boroughs, spanning architecture, graphic design, and other disciplines.

Founded in 2012 out of a Bloomberg Administration survey that mapped the scale of New York's design economy, NYCxDESIGN started as a City Council initiative and has since become the city's official annual design festival: a nonprofit that coordinates a week of independently hosted events across studios, showrooms, schools, trade floors, and public plazas in all five boroughs. The model is deliberately decentralized: no single venue, no single discipline. Architecture sits next to graphic design sits next to entertainment. The 2025 edition, themed 'Design is for Everyone,' ran 280-plus events from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the Starrett-Lehigh Building, with Dumbo newly designated as a design district and its closing party held under the Manhattan Bridge. Year-round programs (the Emerging Designer Showcase, the podcast The Mic hosted by Debbie Millman, the NYCxDESIGNxSouvenir exhibition) extend the argument past festival week. The through-line is a conviction that design isn't a luxury category but a shared civic language, and that New York's particular version of it is too sprawling and pragmatic to be contained in any one room.