Here's your chance to present, influence and inspire your peers, young professionals and seasoned leaders. Share learnings, unique perspectives, deconstruct processes, and even new beginnings from failures. Your voice, our stage.

DesignUp has never had an over arching theme, until 2025. 

DesignUp's 2025 Theme: The Design Currency

In today’s interconnected world, Design is more than aesthetics—it’s a powerful medium of exchange that drives innovation, shapes behaviours, and delivers impact. Just as currency fuels economies, Design propels industries, cultures, and sustainability initiatives.

At its core, The Design Currency explores how design creates value: economic, social, and environmental. From fostering customer loyalty through compelling user experiences to building resilient solutions for a sustainable future, Design is the new capital that defines success.

This theme invites discussions about the role of Design as:

• A Business value generator.
• A Social connector that fosters belonging and innovation.
• A Sustainability enabler tackling the world’s pressing challenges.

With this lens, The Design Currency emphasises the transformational power of Design and its role as a way to humanise and contextualise other resources and assets in this era of rapid change.

You can approach this theme from multiple perspectives: Careers, Leadership, Process, Change, Innovation, Research & Insights, Craft (Design, Writing, Image-making, Films), Storytelling, Sustainability and more. It's your story to share.   

We are looking for submissions in the following categories, within the broader theme:

• Short or Lightning Talks (upto 15 mins max), and welcome first time speakers to apply
• Long Talks (25-35 mins)
• Workshops (3 hours or 5 hours long, for upto 25 people)
• Keynotes are by invite only, but we may, on rare occasions, move Long Talks into Keynotes.

We're always looking out for unique stories and insights, fresh perspectives—the Asian, African, Latin-American and the Indian points-of-view included. And we also welcome stories from around the world and as much as from non-Designers. 

You might like to share a project, deconstruct a process or a journey, even share a philosophy and/or insights. We encourage you to share your failures since we believe a lot of our learnings come from there. We strongly discourage using the platform to market your team, sell your product or organisation.

We cover Premium Economy or Economy class air tickets based on travel time. As well as Airport pick-up and drop, minimum of 2 nights at the Conference hotel. DesignUp is known for it's Speakers' Dinner, it's multiple networking events and activities. DesignUp is independent community-led, volunteer-driven event. We rely on ticket sales and sponsorships to cover our costs.