"Squat at the ICA" invites designers to show work for free during London Design Festival

Designer Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is taking over London's Institute of Contemporary Arts to host a pop-up design fair that doesn't charge for participation, in a bid to "redistribute access and opportunities" within the industry.

Taking place on the final day of the London Design Festival (LDF), the show will spotlight an eclectic mix of projects, ranging from installations to fashion, craft and digital design, selected from an open call that encouraged submissions by creatives from marginalised backgrounds.

Ben Hayoun-Stépanian was originally asked to simply screen her documentary essay Doppelgängers 3 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), following its premiere at SXSW in Austin.

But the designer saw the event, organised in collaboration with the Armenian Film Society, as an opportunity to open the gates to new talent, who might otherwise lack the funds or industry connections to show at LDF.

"For me, it's a way to bring as many people as I can into a place like the ICA, which is of course a place of prestige and recognised as an institution, and actually make sure that as many people as possible can also have access to it," Ben Hayoun-Stépanian told Dezeen.

"If you look at the London Design Festival, or if you look into design as a discipline overall, it requires a proper reshape in terms of the way it's been structured," she added. "The lack of diversity in this field is absolutely mind-blowing. So for me, as someone who runs a design practice, it's like: how can I redistribute access and opportunities?"

"For a mainly male, white-dominated industry, it's more essential and more urgent to make sure that every form of activity or public program or installation always has accessibility as a core principle."

The event, which Ben Hayoun-Stépanian describes as a "squat at the ICA", will occupy the institute's bar from 7 pm on Sunday before the film screening starts at 8.30 pm.

It will be free of charge for both visitors and exhibitors – although participants are asked to bring their own tables, stalls and payment systems, in case they want to sell their work.

"The ICA is aware that we said we were going to do an art fair," Ben Hayoun-Stépanian explained. "But the beauty of it is, they don't fully know the extent of it."

Democratising access to LDF is proving to be a key theme this year, with Alex Tieghi-Walker handing over the curation of various exhibitions in Brompton, one of the festival's main districts, to designers from different communities.

Others, like non-profit collective Design Everything, have resorted to working outside of the official programme by touring an exhibition around the capital in a Luton van.

"I think if you just graduated, it's really, really difficult to actually make a group show, because you incur the cost of rental for the space," Ben Hayoun-Stépanian said. "You have to cope with the cost of living, the student debt that you're going to have to incur for a good part of the development of your practice."

"That also explains why a lot of the young designers these days tend to be less experimental," she added. "Because, of course, if the focus of your practice is to result in income, then you tend to go for things that are more commercially viable or look more commercially viable.

"And that's why we end up with the same type of production and products," she continued. "So it's in everyone's interest, from a creative and innovative perspective, to really support diversity and access."

London Design Festival runs from 13 to 22 September 2025. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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