Ten editions in, the Abierto CDMX remains the clearest proof that designing is not about solving, it’s about imagining.

There are festivals that celebrate design, and there are festivals that think through it. The Abierto de Diseño CDMX belongs firmly to the second category — and that distinction, sustained across ten consecutive editions since 2013, is precisely what makes it one of the most consequential creative events on the Latin American calendar.

Because this was never about aesthetics. It has always been about process.

Since its first edition, the Abierto has operated under a premise The Atelier recognizes as its own: design is not exhibited from above — it is built from within. Each year, the festival opens an international open call — this year running from March 26 to May 24, 2026 — through which professionals, students, collectives, and institutions propose projects that connect the act of designing with everyday life. The result is not a fair. It is an open-air laboratory.

When Design Confronts Its Own Fears: Abierto CDMX

The tenth edition, taking place September 25 through October 4, 2026, arrives with a central exhibition that does not shy away from discomfort. Futuros pánicos, curated by Karla Paniagua and Jorge Camacho, proposes something few design platforms dare to attempt: looking directly at collective fears (climate crisis, labor precarity, technological acceleration, inequality) and turning them into creative material.

The speculative design framing the exhibition is not decorative dystopia. It is a methodology. A way of making visible what is typically normalized, of questioning the futures presented to us as inevitable, and of opening space for other possibilities. In a world saturated with design solutions that optimize the existing, Futuros pánicos asks something harder: what do we actually want to exist?

From The Atelier’s perspective, that is precisely the conversation that matters. Not how something looks, but why it exists — and what it means that it exists the way it does.

Mexico City as Architecture: A Festival That Inhabits the City

What distinguishes the Abierto de Diseño CDMX from other international design festivals is not only its content — it is its spatial architecture.

This tenth edition is anchored at the Centro Nacional de las Artes (Cenart), but for the first time extends southward through the city, connecting for the first time with the Ruta de la Amistad — one of Mexico City’s most emblematic public art projects. Museums, cultural centers, designers’ studios, and creative spaces distributed across the city complete the expanded program.

That transforms Mexico City into something more than a backdrop. It turns the city into an argument.

For The Space — our pillar dedicated to places that are truly inhabited, not merely occupied — this is directly relevant. The Abierto does not separate design from the city: it returns design to it. The studio, the gallery, the coworking space, the museum — all become extensions of the festival itself. All become part of the reading.

This edition organizes its projects not by discipline, but by question: culture and society, environment and regeneration, care, what we inhabit, imagining futures, form and function. It is a curatorial framework that assumes disciplinary borders no longer hold the weight of real problems.

Open by Design: Why the Call for Entries Still Matters

In a creative industry where access tends to narrow with every consolidation cycle, the Abierto maintains openness as a founding principle — and in 2026, that remains a radical stance.

The international open call runs from March 26 to May 24, 2026, across four participation formats. Panorama Abierto brings together projects from every design discipline to map the current state of the creative field. Novedades awards a $90,000 MXN prize to projects developed within the past year. The Laboratorio Académico creates space for universities and educational communities. Programación Abierta invites studios, galleries, museums, schools, and any creative space in the city to open their doors and join the festival from wherever they are.

This is not generosity. It is a position on how culture functions when it takes itself seriously.

Projects will be evaluated by a committee of national and international design figures, with criteria centered on conceptual rigor, clarity of focus, and relevance to the challenges of the present moment.

A Wealthy Note

The design that matters is not the kind that solves what we already know. It is the kind that names what we cannot yet see. The Abierto has spent ten editions doing exactly that — and for ten days each year, Mexico City becomes the space where that work becomes livable.

The Wealth Encounters: Ricardo Lozano & Joanna Ruiz Galindo

We sat down with Ricardo Lozano and Joanna Ruiz Galindo, directors of the Abierto de Diseño CDMX, to talk about what it means to sustain ten editions without losing the capacity to ask uncomfortable questions. About Mexico City’s role in the global design map. About what Futuros pánicos says about this specific moment in history — and about what comes after imagining the future.

The full conversation is available now on our YouTube channel and on Instagram. An while well worth your time.

Watch it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6GplsSgUzQ

Follow us on Instagram @the-wealth.co and discover more in The Space