Detroit Month of Design ran the entire month of September. The 15th edition of the festival lined up about 95 events featuring more than 1,000 designers and creatives across the city. This year was also the 10th anniversary of Detroit's UNESCO City of Design designation, the only one in the United States.
Design Core Detroit produces the festival from its New Center headquarters. Co-Executive Director Kiana Wenzell and her team tied this year's programming to the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which is less dry in practice than it sounds. Belle Isle Commons set up an interactive preview of a proposed walkable plaza on the island.
From Our Side of the Street put up a storytelling installation by generations of Black Detroiters built around the front porch as a space for community, history, and resistance. Waste to Wander dropped a "City of Tomorrow" model showing reuse and waste solutions. On Air Off Grid had Solar Party Detroit running a DJ series powered entirely by their solar generator rentals.
Cranbrook Art Museum's "Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the U.S." was the marquee institutional show. The Detroit Warehouse Art and Design Fair set up at the historic Boyer Campbell Building. Design Jam, the annual hands-on workshop on adaptive design, focused this year on solutions for the limb-loss community.
The College for Creative Studies opened "Designing Detroit" on September 5, a Design Core retrospective on view through November 21. Eastern Market After Dark, the festival's signature event, hit September 18. More than 30,000 people walked through the market sheds and the surrounding streets.
Murals in the Market, hitting its 10th anniversary the same week, painted the walls. The two festivals overlap by design. Wallpaper named Detroit "City of the Year" for 2026 in its annual Design Awards, partly on the strength of this run of programming.
The 2025 curatorial committee included Rachel Nelson of Concetti, Dorota Coy of ArtClvb, Lauren A. Hood of the Institute for AfroUrbanism, Tanya Saldivar-Ali of AGI Construction, and others. Detroit was named UNESCO's first City of Design in the United States in 2015.
The full 2025 calendar lives at detroitmonthofdesign.org. Cross-neighborhood, citywide.
