Why a theme?
The theme at Design POV is a lens that sharpens perspectives, turning individual voices into a collective conversation where each space at The Core maintains its own identity. Last year, Echoes of Tomorrow created a movement where India’s most celebrated architecture and design studios honoured traditions that shaped tomorrow’s designs.
Theme for DPOV ’26
Design isn’t just something you look at. It isn’t meant to transcend the boundaries of space, echoing in the sound of footsteps on wood and lingering in the scent of sandalwood.
To honour the feeling of design, this year’s theme ‘Sense & Sensibility’ asks the questions most design conversations ignore. It shifts how you think about what design can do, and more importantly, what it can make you feel.
Architecture and design firms, participating brands, and artists will ask:
- How do spaces awaken dormant senses?
- Can design trigger memory, emotion, and even instinct?
- Where does luxury stop being visual and start being visceral?
These are provocations designed to push all the participants beyond what’s expected and into a territory that feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and ultimately more honest.
Sense & Sensibility invites creators to craft environments that feel alive, pulsating under every new perspective. It’s a call to orchestrate sensorial experiences like none before – spaces that reshape how we perceive, remember, and emotionally respond to the world around us.
For The Core
This theme becomes a challenge to explore what a space feels like when your eyes are closed. How do materiality, proportion, and sound shape memory and mood? What happens when design stops performing for the gaze and starts engaging the body, the instinct, the subconscious?
The 17 architects interpreting Sense & Sensibility will answer these questions in 17 different ways, each one a testament to how deeply personal and profoundly varied sensorial design can be.
For Brand Partners
Sense & Sensibility presents an opportunity to move beyond product display and into experiential storytelling for participating brands. It’s a chance to present materials, finishes, and innovations in ways that stir instinct, that make visitors touch, feel, and recall.
This theme asks brands to consider not just what their products look like, but how they sound when interacted with, how they feel under fingertips, how they age and evolve, and what emotional response they provoke when experienced fully.
