La Barcelona Design Week presents PRO-TEST, the theme of its 21st edition

Barcelona Design Week presents the theme of its 21st edition: PRO-TEST. From 14 to 25 October, the city will host a new edition focused on the value of process, experimentation and design’s ability to turn ideas into real proposals.

The concept is rooted in two essential phases of the design process: prototyping and testing. These are the moments when ideas stop being abstract and begin to engage with reality: with materials, uses, needs and the people they are meant to serve.

PRO-TEST highlights this space of work and exploration, where proposals are tested, reviewed and allowed to evolve. A space where we discover what works, what needs to be reconsidered and what can become a meaningful solution.

The theme also opens up a second reading. On the one hand, the prefix pro-, linked to what moves forward, proposes, promotes, projects and provokes. On the other, test, understood as trial, experiment and contrast. Together, they give rise to the idea of protest as proposition: a way of responding to uncertainty not only through critique, but through the construction of visible, tangible alternatives that remain open to revision.

In this sense, Barcelona Design Week 2026 presents design as a practice capable of intervening: of turning questions into processes, intuitions into models and alternatives into evidence. An edition that focuses on prototypes with purpose, on ideas willing to be questioned and on the processes that allow us to imagine more habitable futures.

In dialogue with the World Capital of Architecture 2026, BDW proposes design as a tool for testing and building the spaces —physical, social and cultural— in which those futures will take shape.

The visual identity, by Abuela

The visual identity of this edition is by Abuela, the studio in charge of giving visual form to the world of PRO-TEST.

Their proposal will accompany the narrative of an edition that aims to spark questions, open up processes and set design in motion: from idea to prototype, from prototype to test, and from test to a possible real transformation.