Exhibitions
People Powered Prosperity at the London Design Biennale 2025
People Powered Prosperity was presented at the London Design Biennale 2025, held at Somerset House in June. The Biennale’s broader programme, curated under the theme “Surface Reflections” by Artistic Director Dr Samuel Ross MBE, featured world-leading design, research, and thought-leadership events.
People Powered Prosperity explored the multidimensional nature of prosperity through a citizen science approach, highlighting how individuals from diverse communities collaborated to co-design innovative pathways toward improved livelihoods, secure environments, democratic participation, healthy cities, and climate-resilient futures. It showcased its new approach of working directly with trained citizens to rethink prosperity with and for communities. This method brought forward fresh forms of knowledge creation, innovative solutions, and practical tools for businesses and policymakers, enabling citizens to power the transformations needed to tackle today’s most pressing challenges. Visitors met the citizen scientists who conducted research and learned from IGP staff about the innovative tools and metrics developed to support local governments and businesses in delivering social impact.
Alongside the exhibition, IGP hosted panel discussions on inclusive, community-led innovation and its role in shaping urban futures. The sessions spotlighted collaborative projects with residents, communities, and local authorities, covering topics including improving women’s safety in public spaces, developing inclusive, affordable communal eating spaces, reclaiming visual rights in public space, and the role of design in social entrepreneurship and fostering inclusive urban environments. Panellists demonstrated how participatory research and creative engagement can unlock local knowledge and drive meaningful change in sustainability and equity, showing how design becomes a powerful tool for justice, regeneration, and prosperity when shaped jointly with communities.
Curated by Prof. Dame Henrietta L. Moore, Dr Saffron Woodcraft, Eva Lamorgese, Joseph Cook, and Twinkle Jayakumar.
People Powered Prosperity will be on public display at UCL East this autumn, further information here.
Vital Lebanon: capacities of people, capacities of cities
The exhibition showcased the work of the former RELIEF Centre as it transitioned into PROCOL Lebanon. It explored how Lebanese communities construct livelihoods and forms of prosperity in times of uncertainty, highlighting three key elements: uncertainty, sociality, and vitality. By reframing uncertainty as potential, emphasising collaboration through sociality, and recognising vitality as the energy for resilience and growth, “Vital Lebanon” offered fresh insights into the diverse and adaptive ways communities imagine and sustain life in a volatile context.
Find out more about this exhibition here.
Sharing Prosperity: An interactive gaming experience for the Barbican’s Our Time on Earth exhibition
The IGP, in collaboration with art direction from studio DVTK and Kim Boutin, explores how the relational economy could look and feel in 2040 through an emotional and interactive new gaming experience.
Sharing Prosperity ran as part of the Imagine section in the Barbican Centre Our Time on Earth exhibition from 05 May to 29 August, 2022 welcoming over 200,000 visitors. It was also presented at the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City, Canada (co-producers of the exhibition) from 15 June - 17 December 2023, before continuing an international tour.
In this unique new game, Sharing Prosperity, users are able to explore how the planet could flourish through means of radical solidarity, innovative collaboration and shared wealth across all species. Choosing from seven abstract characters of nature (such as a tree, a river, a mountain, or perhaps a glacier), players explore an immersive world where they collect resources whilst learning facts about their properties, to create a balanced solidarity chain.
Find out more about this exhibition here and read The Bartlett Review here.
Character Selector: “Swipe to select your Character” Representing: Mountain, Bird, Human, Glacier, River, Fungi, and Tree.
Images © DVTK
Provocation by Prof. Henrietta L. Moore.