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The central theme of the 2025 Gwangju Design Biennale is 《You, the World : How Design Embraces Humanity》, proposing inclusion as a fundamental principle of design.

This year’s Biennale suggests that design is not merely about aesthetics or functionality, but also a means of promoting better lives for all.

 

At the heart of the 2025 Gwangju Design Biennale is the idea that each individual represents a world unto themselves — and that design can serve as a bridge between these infinite worlds. Through the lens of 'Inclusive Design', the exhibition incorporates four key perspectives — the world, life, mobility, and the future — to illustrate the ways in which design fosters care, connection, and coexistence.

 

Spread across four exhibition halls, the Biennale brings together a global network of design organizations and academic institutions in order to trace evolving philosophies and practices of inclusive design. By presenting a diverse range of case studies and projects, this year’s Biennale demonstrates how different approaches to design effectively embrace difference, connect communities, and imagine a better tomorrow.

 

The 2025 Gwangju Design Biennale invites visitors to reflect on the shared challenges of humanity and consider how design, as a fundamentally interpretive and creative endeavor, facilitates alternative responses to common concerns and affirms our collective values through heterogeneous expressions.


Exhibition Hall 1: Inclusive World

Curator l Boomee Park

 

Since the early 2000s, inclusive design has emerged as a key strategy in design policy worldwide. Exhibition Hall 1 brings together significant examples that demonstrate how inclusive design has taken shape in different cultures, conditions, and systems.

This section of the exhibition traces the manner in which inclusion has become both a design method and a civic value, from its origins in various social contexts to its evolving influence on contemporary society.

 

Here, projects from leading universities around the world offer insight into current research, education and practice of inclusive design, revealing a growing global commitment to design that foregrounds empathy, equity, and access.

 

Exhibition Hall 2: Inclusive Life

Curator l Kyungmi Lee


Inclusive design is not merely a methodology, but also a social gesture that ensures dignity and participation for all.

This section of the exhibition asks how design might help to redraw or remove the visible and invisible lines of exclusion, indifference, and systemic imbalance prevalent in contemporary society.

Moving beyond the realm of objects, Exhibition Hall 2 spotlights inclusive design as it appears in public systems, urban spaces, and emotional frameworks of daily life.

What emerges is a portrait of design not as solution, but as an attitude of attention — to difference, to proximity, and to the quiet architectures of care.

 

 

 

Exhibition Hall 3: Inclusive Mobility

Curator l Doowon Cha


Although commonly understood in terms of movement, mobility also encompasses diverse modes of access, proximity, and social connection. The ability to move freely across space, both physically and interpersonally, is a key facilitator of participation, dignity, and autonomy.

Exhibition Hall 3 focuses on the ways in which inclusive mobility solutions — from public systems to personal and micro-mobility technologies — respond to the concerns of individuals who may be excluded from movement, including people with physical disabilities, migrants navigating unfamiliar infrastructures.

 

 

In this context, mobility is proposed as a shared right. Through the interplay of technology, design, and human experience, inclusive systems are capable of reshaping the mobility ecosystem, allowing us to imagine a future in which movement operates as the very foundation of social belonging.

 

Exhibition Hall 4: Inclusive Future

Curator l Changhee Lee


Will the technologies shaping our future deepen exclusion, or offer new grounds for connection?

Must innovation take priority over humanity?

In Exhibition Hall 4, the boundaries between technology and humanity, nature and city, material and digital are interrogated and invalidated.

Through four interconnected themes — robotics, AI, nature, and well-being — this section of the exhibition explores the potential of design to reimagine coexistence in an era of rapid change.

Rather than celebrating progress for its own sake, we must ask ourselves a deeper question: how will inclusion be defined in the age to come?

 

 

This offers us the opportunity to consider a future in which design is not just functional, but fundamentally relational and rooted in values of empathy, care, and interdependence.