

Exploring Justice at the DesignTO Festival
Happy New Year friends! We hope you had a wonderful holiday and that 2025 is off to a great start. And with that comes a reminder to mark your calendars and join us January 24–February 2, 2025 to celebrate the 15th year of the DesignTO Festival. The Festival schedule is live, offering 100+ events and exhibits designed to deepen your appreciation of design and its role in shaping a sustainable, just, and joyful world. Tickets to such key events as the Launch Party and DesignTO Talks are going fast – check out the schedule now so you will not miss a thing.
With so much to explore, we’re spotlighting each Festival pillar in our newsletters to help you pick and choose what you would like to see. Last time, we focused on sustainability, featuring 13 compelling programs that will have us reconsidering what sustainability looks and can look like today – and tomorrow.
And now we turn our attention to the justice pillar and dive into how design can help create a more equitable future for all. Social equity is the fair and impartial distribution of resources and opportunities across the board no matter individual circumstances. This notion applies to all areas of society, including education, housing, policing, transportation, and welfare. Improving social equity can come in many forms, as you will see at the following 9 Festival events and exhibits (arranged alphabetically) below, ranging from improving labour practices and supporting local businesses to providing universal career advancement opportunities and challenging dominant narratives.

January 24 – February 2, 2025 | on view 24/7
Secret Planet Print Shop, 918 Danforth Avenue
Online shopping hides immense costs. Amazon profits from tax evasion, poor working conditions, and environmental harm. Inspired by Warhol’s Brillo boxes, this installation exposes how mega-corporations exploit consumer complacency while crushing small businesses. These cartons urge us to rethink our choices – supporting local businesses can drive meaningful change and resist harmful systems.
Blood, Water & Bathurst Street
January 13 – February 15, 2025 | see listing for hours
Urbanspace Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West
‘BW&B’ is a textile-based mapping project by Naomi Daryn Boyd, exploring the histories and communities shaping the lands along Bathurst Street. This participatory work uses wool and natural materials to engage the public in sustainable material experiments, inviting contributions to an evolving map and dialogue on local histories.
BIPOC Portfolio Collaboration 2025
January 30 & 31, 2025 | see listing for times, places, and to register
Join Gensler and Canadian design leaders for the 4th annual BIPOC Portfolio Collaboration, supporting BIPOC students in design. This event offers one-on-one portfolio reviews, career guidance, and skill-building with professionals, fostering social equity by empowering future architects and designers with tools to excel in their careers.
CommunityStreets: A Youth Lens on the Future of Urban Housing
4pm February 1, 2025 | see listing to register
Open Space Gallery, 49 McCaul Street
‘CommunityStreets’ is a panel discussion focused on housing and youth, emphasizing social equity. Youth will join civic leaders and activists to discuss affordability, access, and the future of housing in urban Toronto. With rising housing costs, youth demand a voice in shaping housing policies and solutions to social, economic, and health challenges.

Ideas Forum: Labour in Architecture
12pm January 28, 2025 | Online
Organized by DesignTO in partnership with the Toronto Society of Architects, ‘Ideas Forum: Labour in Architecture’ features five fast-paced presentations representing diverse organizational structures, including co-operative, union, and employee-owned. This Ideas Forum considers the business of architecture as a project worthy of (re)design.
Partition: a line and its memory
January 24 – February 2, 2025 | on view 24/7
Design Fabrication Zone at TMU, 110 Bond Street
Dead Projects’ latest exhibition centres social equity by showcasing emerging minoritized artists and examining how borders shape lived experiences. Through accessible virtual and physical spaces, Mahmoud Alhaj and Kasra Goodarznezhad challenge dominant narratives, offering alternative perspectives on state violence, identity, and connection.
January 24 – February 2, 2025 | on view 24/7
Milky’s, 760 Dundas Street West
Rob Shostak’s sculptural installation highlights the social equity challenges of rising living costs and the unseen burdens individuals carry daily. Through concrete shopping bags stretched to their limits, the work emphasizes empathy, compassion, and fairness, urging us to support one another without needing full understanding, fostering collective resilience.
January 24 – 26, 2025 | see listing for times
Remote Gallery, 568A Richmond Street West
This immersive exhibit by Nuhad Haffar-Orsini and Salma Serry explores grief, migration, and collective memory through the “sufra”, a communal meal. It highlights the social equity of shared cultural histories, transforming everyday objects into symbols of resilience, identity, and belonging for displaced communities navigating loss and connection.

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This list is but a fraction of the 100+ events, exhibitions and installations taking place across the city of Toronto. In the next newsletter, we identify the Festival’s hottest hubs. These 6 neighbourhoods have a high concentration of DesignTO programming meaning if you only have time to visit one community, you are guaranteed to have a design-packed visit.