Festival «VFCD 2026» (Vietnam Festival of Creativity & Design)

   The Vietnam Festival of Creativity & Design returns under the theme Living Festival, and its centre is Nina Next Space on Nguyễn Tất Thành in Xóm Chiếu ward, backed by a string of satellite creative spaces around Ho Chi Minh City. For seven days the main exhibition floor runs from nine in the morning until six in the evening, and the whole festival is free to attend — only a handful of capacity-limited sessions ask for advance registration or an invitation.

   The schedule is organised day by day: the opening ceremony and keynote take the afternoon of the first day at Nina Next Space; the same day also carries a forum on the future of creative festivals and a studio talk on street objects and the new comfort. The days that follow hold the continuous exhibition, a run of workshops, the Circular Design Week fieldwork across Hậu Giang, Cần Thơ and Trà Vinh, and a set of in-depth presentations. All told, more than thirty activities are sorted into five programme tracks.

   The festival was initiated by RMIT University Vietnam in partnership with UNESCO, the Vietnam National Institute of Culture and Arts Studies and a group of creative partners. This is not the first run: the programme started in 2019 in Hanoi as the Vietnam Festival of Media & Design on the theme of the creative city, and by the organisers' own account the 2024 edition was already its sixth year.

   The five tracks of this edition:

• — Exhibition — Living Festival: works by Vietnamese and international artists, photographers and designers, remade, activated and reinterpreted while the festival is still running;
• — Forum — Festival Futures Forwards: a forum on how a creative festival is built and kept alive;
• — Satellite Events — Living Laboratories: talks, workshops and urban walking trails in other creative spaces;
• — Circular Design Week 2026: fieldwork and discussion on circular design, recycling and the environment;
• — VNx Panel — Learning Beyond Classroom: the strand devoted to learning outside the classroom.

   The way the main exhibition works is the most interesting thing about it. Rather than presenting finished pieces as fixed outcomes, the organisers let the works keep being made, altered, performed and reinterpreted across the seven days, which turns visitors into part of the process instead of an audience in front of it.

   The audience the organisers describe is pupils, students and young people aged 18 to 25 with an interest in creativity, art, design, architecture and communication, alongside young designers, independent artists and anyone drawn to sustainable creative solutions.

   Seven days is more than anyone can cover, so the sensible approach is to pick one or two tracks that match your own field and read the daily schedule on the registration portal. Where a session caps its numbers, booking early saves the trip.