Open Call for Artists & Designers
The Strange Everyday
Rethinking the Ordinary
We are thrilled to announce our open call for designers, artists, and makers to take part in our upcoming exhibition.
The Strange Everyday, held during the London Design Festival from 17–19 September 2025.
This curated group exhibition explores how design can transform the familiar into something unexpected. Focusing on the everyday objects, routines, and environments we often overlook, the exhibition invites works that reinterpret the ordinary through
experimentation, curiosity, and new perspectives.
We welcome submissions from designers, artists, and makers working across disciplines, whether self-taught, formally trained, or somewhere in between, whose work challenges conventional uses of everyday objects and experiences. Projects may range from subtle interventions to playful or speculative ideas that reveal the strange and surprising in our daily lives.
About the Theme
Every day is often overlooked.
The objects we reach for without thinking.
The routines are repeated each day.
The familiar spaces that quietly shape how we live.
Yet within these ordinary moments lies enormous creative potential.
The Strange Everyday explores how design can transform the familiar into something unexpected. By shifting scale, material, context, or function, designers reveal new possibilities within the things we thought we already understood.
A chair might behave differently.
A household object might take on a new purpose.
A simple routine might become a performative act.
Through subtle interventions, playful experimentation, or speculative thinking,
designers can disrupt our habits and invite us to see the ordinary in new ways.
This exhibition invites works that challenge how everyday objects, actions, and environments are perceived and experienced.
From objects and installations to digital works, performances, and experimental practices,
The Strange Everyday celebrates design that uncovers the extraordinary hidden within daily life.
What We Are Looking For
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Unexpected approaches to everyday objects or routines
Projects that reinterpret ordinary tools, environments, or daily habits through unusual perspectives, altered functions, or playful interventions. -
Reimagining the familiar
Work that transforms common materials, objects, or experiences into something surprising, strange, or newly meaningful. -
Experimental and speculative practices
Projects that explore alternative possibilities for everyday design through experimentation, improvisation, or speculative thinking. -
Subtle disruptions of daily life
Designs that challenge habits, question conventions, or introduce small but powerful shifts in how everyday situations are experienced. -
Hidden narratives within the ordinary
Work that reveals overlooked stories, cultural meanings, or personal experiences embedded in everyday objects and environments. -
Cross-disciplinary and hybrid practices
Submissions from a wide range of media, including objects, installations, moving image, -
performance, sound, text, digital works, or participatory projects.
6 Awards To Go
Celebrating works where meaning is carried through material and process rather than explanation. This award recognises practices where transformation, surface, and structure communicate story, memory, or place. The work speaks through making, revealing intention in every
material decision.
Honouring craft as lived experience. This award celebrates works where emotion, memory, and care are embedded within the act of making itself. Process, tactility, and sensitivity to material shape how the work is felt as much as how it is seen.
Selected by the curatorial team for its outstanding contribution to the exhibition’s theme, execution, and relevance within contemporary design discourse.
Recognising an emerging designer whose work demonstrates a distinctive voice and strong creative potential. This award celebrates practices that show clarity of vision, originality, and the ability to contribute meaningfully to the future of contemporary design.
Celebrating projects with a strong conceptual foundation. This award recognises works where ideas, critical thinking, and design intention are central to the work, shaping how it is understood
and experienced.
Honouring practices driven by experimentation and exploration. This award celebrates designers who challenge conventional approaches through new processes, hybrid methods, or unconventional ways of making.
Join the Creative Journey
Submit your projects, installations, and concepts, and stand a chance to be featured in this internationally acclaimed event. Embrace the opportunity to connect with fellow designers, industry professionals, and design enthusiasts.
To ensure the highest level of curation and support for the selected projects, there is a participating fee for each application.
Category:
1) 2D Art £280
2) 3D Art & Installation Art £380
Fee covers:
- Wall space, installation, and curation.
- Private viewing with bar included.
- Event documentation provided (photos, videos).
- Collective promotion and marketing.
- Labels and packaging for your works using your original.
We take 0% commission from every sale.
*Only a 2.5% card transaction fee is charged by the payment provider.
You will get:
1) Official London Design Festival Maker Feature
2) Artist Interview
3) Networking Opportunities
4) Enhanced Visibility
5) Access to Art Market Insights
6) Professional Documentation
7) Customised Artist Support
8) Potential Sales and Commissions
9) Inclusion in London Design Festival Archives
10) International Exposure
How to apply?
To apply, please submit a PDF with the following:
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Artist bio. (Max 100 words)
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Artist statement. (Max 100 words)
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Artwork statement. (Max 100 words)
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5-10 images of your project.
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A summary of how your project addresses the theme of The Strange Everyday.
Submission Deadline: 20 April 2026, 23:59GMT.
You will receive a response within 7 working days of submitting your application.
Please note: All submissions will be carefully reviewed by our curatorial team, and only selected works will be included in the exhibition. Participation is by selection, not by payment. Only artworks submitted and approved during the application process will be eligible for display. No substitutions or unapproved works will be accepted.
How to Participate
Submitting your work is easy!
Complete the Open Call registration form. Share your vision, passion, and portfolio, and let your creativity shine. We are on the lookout for groundbreaking concepts that challenge convention and inspire awe.
Application Fee: £5
Please note that the application fee is non-refundable.