Southern Sweden Design Days 2025: Echoes of Design, Community, and Responsibility

By Åse Hanna Waern

The traditional clean lines, timeless forms and strong sense of functionality that symbolises Scandinavian design has in recent years been accompanied by emotion, experimentation and a social commentary. Southern Swedish Design days, now in its fifth edition, is a great example of this evolution. Held across the city of Malmö from May 22-25, the festival offered a city-wide platform where established designers, students and collectives all came together to explore what design means today. 

Mapping Design in Motion, Malmö 2025. A sneak peek at the Southern Sweden Design Days 2025 map — where creativity spreads across Malmö like ripples. From student studios to industrial warehouses, each stop tells a story that echoes far beyond design.

This years theme - Echo - served as a gentle reminder that design is not created in a vacuum. As written on the website “Design is not isolated - it resonates, evolves, and influences its surroundings. Every design solution creates ripples, impacting both the environments it exists in and the people who interact with it.” In Malmö this could be felt through the exhibitions, from industrial spaces to intimate studio visits and personal installations. Unlike many design hubs, Malmö doesn’t have its own major design school. Yet it has quietly become one of Scandinavias most exciting places for emerging talent. Thanks in part to its multicultural identity and close proximity to design-conscious Copenhagen, it is a place that attracts a new generation of designers looking for something different. It has become a city that values experimentation over prestige, process over perfection. 

VÄV. 10. Form/ Design Center, installation view at SSDD 2025

Where design fairs in Stockholm might highlight big-name brands, Southern Sweden Design Days intentionally shifts the focus - and start from the ground up. Placing students and newcomers at the forefront, giving space to projects that blur the lines between art, craft and commentary.  The organisation behind the festival is Form/Design Center, Malmös leading platform for architecture, crafts and design and part of the non-profit Swedish Design association (Svensk Form). 

Lokstallarna, SSDD 2025, Main location

Set in a former railway workshop in Malmö’s Kirseberg district, Lokstallarna served once again as the beating heart of Southern Sweden Design Days 2025. With its raw industrial character, high ceilings, and traces of past labor, the space provided the ideal backdrop for a festival rooted in experimentation, dialogue, and process. Rather than a polished showcase, Lokstallarna offered a lived-in, flexible setting where design could be touched, tested, and questioned — creating an environment that encouraged encounters as much as exhibitions.

A key hub for this year’s festival was Lokstallarna, a former railway workshop tucked away in an industrial part of the city. The rawness of the space set the tone for a festival that felt more open-ended than polished, serving as a reminder that good design often begins with curiosity rather than answers. Inside, visitors encountered everything from textile works and furniture to immersive installations exploring time, memory, and material.

We’re looking for the South, an exhibition that resulted from the collaboration between Dorthé Neppelberg -the Malmö-based design studio-, and Normal Object Factory, SSDD, Malmö, 2025.

Among the many highlights was a quiet but thought provoking exhibition by designers My Comét and Stina Henriksson, titled “Väntrum” (Waiting room). Typically seen as sterile, anonymous spaces, waiting rooms are rarely spaces where we choose to linger. But here the designers wanted to explore something different: a space made with intent and purpose. Objects were curated with care, meant to be used, noticed, felt. It wasn’t about spectacle. It was about presence. A space where you could simply be, without pressure or expectations. 

Vantrum, a group exhibition that explores the waiting room curated by My Comét and Stina Henriksson for SSDD, Malmö 2025.

The intimate and personal was also seen with designer Jenny Nordberg, who opened up her private studio in Malmö to the public, offering a glimpse into her design process - one that blends her Finnish roots, Nordic materials, and a belief in design as both a ritual and a way to create connection.

Inside the Studio of Jenny Nordberg. During Southern Sweden Design Days 2025. With a background in industrial design and a mindset that challenges seriality and overproduction, her work often unfolds in real time — embracing improvisation, repetition, and chance.

Another poignant exhibition was “Made in Bangladesh, Dumped in Ghana, Back in Malmö”, a collaborative work that traced the global journey of discarded clothing. Despite promises of recycling and reuse, much of our fashion still ends up in landfills or washed up on foreign shores. This exhibition showed us the lifecycle of our fast-fashion garments, putting us in front of an uncomfortable truth.

Created by Anna Lidström, Gustav Mariner, and Jonas Larsson, the garments were more than just clothing, they told us stories : one had been carefully cleaned, repaired, and remade, then offered for rent - a kind of hopeful utopia. Another was left dirty and mouldy, carrying all the visible marks of a landfill. The third, titled “This is not how the story ends”, imagined a new future for design: one that doesn’t just recycle, but rethinks entirely. Acting as evidence of what we buy, what we throw away, and what these choices cost, the exhibition was uncomfortable, poetic and necessary. 

Made in Bangladesh, Dumped in Ghana, Back in Malmö – THREE WAYS TO BE COMPLICIT

This collaborative installation by Anna Lidström, Gustav Mariner, and Jonas Larsson unpacks the tangled geographies of global fashion. Three garments, three narratives, one uncomfortable truth: we are all entangled. By tracing the journey of discarded clothing across continents, the project doesn’t moralize — it materializes responsibility. Each piece, marked by care, neglect, or reimagination, acts as a document of choices made and systems upheld.

Southern Sweden Design Days doesn’t try to be the biggest or the most glamorous. But what it offers feels even more urgent: a space to pause, connect, and reconsider. The festival shows us that design isn’t just about creating new things - it’s about asking better questions. In an age when design feels driven by trends and social media aesthetics, perhaps we should make room for deeper stories, for work that connects us to each other, to the past, and to the world around us.

And maybe that’s the real takeaway from this year’s theme, ECHO. That design, at its best, doesn’t just reflect - it resonates.