Talks
Documented session titles, formats, and descriptions from the 2024 and 2025 Riyadh editions.
2024 · Evolving Thought, Shaping Life
2024 sessions
Designing Across Generations
How people from different generations experience and understand design, and ways to create designs that connect everyone regardless of age.
STEAM-Driven Design
How all five fields combine to develop creative solutions for real-world problems, moving from theory to applied practice.
The Role of Research and Focus Groups in Design
How research and focus groups inform the design process and guide frameworks, policies, and governance to reflect lived experience.
Material Ecology in Design
How natural systems and scientific insights transform the way spaces are designed, emphasising sustainable and nature-inspired solutions.
Bridging Creativity and Science: The Maker Movement
How design and science meet in the Maker Movement, using creative tools to turn scientific ideas into real projects.
Design in the Age of Change
How design helps navigate change, and how designers adapt as technology, society, and the environment evolve.
The Science of Language in Nature and Design
The hidden language of nature, how organisms communicate, and what these systems can teach designers and researchers.
What Does Knowledge of Design Mean?
Advisory board members share what the platform means to them, and how they see its role today.
The Evolution of Language
From ancient scripts to modern forms such as emojis. How language evolves alongside culture, technology, and collective understanding.
2025 · Design as Knowledge / Knowledge as Design
2025 sessions
Infrastructure: What Does It Mean?
Infrastructure defined as a layered system: physical assets, capability development, standards, financial pathways, and governance roles.
Designing the Saudi Future
Imagination as a public force. Cultural ambition, research capacity, and technical invention as interconnected drivers of national direction.
Leadership and the Future of STEAM
Leadership reframed as a design practice. Leaders as stewards of conditions that enable knowledge to circulate across domains.
Designing from Place: The Saudi Imagination
Geography, climate, craft, and regional identity as sources of applied intelligence.
Designing Systems of Change
Design as a systems practice, directing how change moves through institutions, communities, and sectors.
Cultural Measurement and Impact
Moving beyond counting events to metrics that reflect sector health, creative contribution, and cultural value.
Designing with Intelligence
Artificial intelligence as a thinking tool rather than a shortcut. How designers use it to ask better questions.
The Future of Materials
Biological research, fabrication processes, and climate-responsive material development.
At the Riyadh editions
Workshops & gatherings
KPMG
Industry transformation and future systems
One of the world's leading professional services networks, operating at the centre of the Kingdom's transformation agenda. Their masterclass examined how design thinking is transforming decision-making frameworks and driving systemic change across sectors.
Facilitated by Syam Jamaly ↗
KILMITAIN
Cultural practice and creative research
A platform empowering creative entrepreneurs across the Arab Gulf. Their masterclass guided participants through frameworks for translating creative practice into investable, sustainable ventures.
Facilitated by Sheikha Fouz Al Sabah ↗
Women in Architecture and Design
Coffee with Knowledge of Design
An intimate gathering held a few days before the main edition, celebrating women across architecture and design, and the contribution they make across the field.