This is not yet another festival devoted to selecting the perfect armchair for your sitting room. It is about something much more fundamental: our very survival. The World Health Organisation (WHO) forecasts that by 2050 there will be 2.1 billion people aged 60 and over worldwide. That is twice the figure recorded in 2020. Over the coming decades, adapting cities, housing, public services and technology to people of every age will present a formidable challenge. Simply putting in a lift or lowering a kerb can no longer be regarded as sufficient accommodation. What is required is a fundamental reconsideration of the way we inhabit the spaces around us.

And this precisely is where intelligent design has a role to play. As Andżelika Jabłońska, PDF's director, aptly observes, "Designers, architects and urban planners shape far more than the visual character of our surroundings: they influence the everyday conditions that foster health, activity and social connections. What we need are solutions that are smart, adaptable and simple and can be put into practice here and now while genuinely transforming the systems in which we live.

Over the span of seven days, Poznań will become an open laboratory and a platform for dialogue. The centrepiece of this year's programme is the Poznań Design Talks: Futures of Longevity conference. Its focus will be on some of the most prominent contemporary ideas surrounding longevity. The aim is to subject fashionable concepts to a closer examination and consider their actual value. Among the first to come under scrutiny will be the celebrated Blue Zones - sites around the world known for their unusually large populations of centenarians. Popular culture has reduced their supposed secret to a neat formula: eat vegetables, walk regularly, keep lots of friends, and you too will live to be a hundred. The festival intends to look beyond this appealing narrative and investigate what is actually underneath it.

"There is an ongoing scientific debate surrounding this concept. Questions have been raised about the quality of the demographic data on which it is based. Some of the original zones are now regarded as historical and the concept itself has become largely commercialised", explains Andżelika Jabłońska. "We want to know what is left when the marketing gloss is removed, and whether those observations can inform actual design choices in Polish cities."

This question entails profound practical implications. How might the notion of an open, multigenerational lifestyle translate to densely built housing estates, the lively Jeżyce neighbourhood or Poznań's Rataje district? The festival will therefore also turn its attention to the much-debated concept of "the 15-minute city' - the idea that six fundamental needs: housing, employment, shopping, healthcare, education and leisure, should be accessible to each of us within fifteen minutes on foot or by bicycle. A utopian proposition? We will have an opportunity to explore the answer.

The programme features six lectures and a panel discussion. Among the speakers is Christal Burnette, a researcher at the Okinawa Research Centre for Longevity Science, who will explain the traditional Japanese nutritional approach known as yakuzen, alongside the philosophy of ikigai. Catherine Gall, executive director of the ETI laboratory at the Sorbonne in Paris, will bring a very different and decidedly pragmatic perspective. It was there that the concept of the 15-minute city was first invented. Also represented will be a perspective frequently absent from the Western bubble. Diana Rivera, a Peruvian gastroenterologist, will recall a difficult reality: when public healthcare systems fail, responsibility for caring for ageing relatives falls almost entirely to families. In view of the challenges confronting Poland's elderly care system, her contribution promises to be particularly timely.

From the standpoint of design, the talk I am most eager to hear is that by David Sim - an acclaimed architect and author of the cult book Soft City. Sim's work has taken him from the Scottish Highlands to the heart of Tokyo. His philosophy is disarmingly straightforward: the shape of our built environment and the configuration of our streets influence how much movement and contact with our neighbours become part of daily life. Rather than lecturing us on healthy habits, Sim creates environments that make us actually want to walk to the bakery.

Yet the Poznań Design Festival is, above all, a celebration of visual culture and design that can be experienced at close quarters. Archipelago of Ideas brings together seven festival exhibitions, with the principal one housed at the Stary Browar (Old Brewery). Fourteen different interpretations of a long life will be presented. These range from objects that seem to have emerged from transhumanist imaginaries, including an artificial heart, to projects grounded firmly in an acceptance of impermanence. A clothing collection drawing inspiration from kintsugi promises to be spectacular. Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics by emphasising their cracks with gold rather than hiding them. Here, the designer turns that poetic image towards the ageing body, drawing attention to precisely those features that popular culture relentlessly encourages us to conceal beneath filters and Botox.

The exhibitions will also feature highly practical forms of design, crucially without repulsive and sterile aesthetics. Among them will be a crochet kit intended for hand rehabilitation and ceramic tableware with specially shaped contours. Both are designed to help people with limited mobility to hold utensils and eat more easily, while deliberately avoiding a conspicuously medical or orthopaedic appearance. An object can - and should - remain beautiful even when its purpose is therapeutic.

The organisers are not content simply to catalogue the problems. PDF also wants to produce practical tools that can be put to use. Working with Adam Mickiewicz University (UAM) and Poznań's Centre for Senior Citizen Initiatives, the festival will develop the "Silver Map', a set of design recommendations. Its contents will emerge from workshops bringing together students, architects and Poznań's own senior citizens.

"Designing a long-lived city starts with a change of perspective. The aim is not to create a city "for the elderly', but rather a place in which people can stay young while also having the chance to age well", says Agata Gawlak, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Poznań University of Technology.

This year's festival will be more than a comfortable celebration of Poznań's greatness. Its central theme also holds up an unusually revealing mirror to the city itself. Ten years ago, Poznań became Poland's second city to join the global network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities, a WHO initiative. At the time, the city undertook to remove barriers systematically and improve older residents' access to culture, buildings and transport. The festival's 13th edition offers an ideal occasion to check progress, taking a bold candid look at how well the capital of Wielkopolska has actually honoured those commitments.

Barbara Pilawska

translated by Krzysztof Kotkowski

13th Poznań Design Festival "Longevity'
23-29 October, Stary Browar (Old Brewery) and other venues
for more, see: Poznań Design Festival

© Wydawnictwo Miejskie Posnania 2026