For the 10th edition of Digital Design Days, we presented Talkscapes: a live generative experience transforming speakers’ words and audience reactions into unique landscape posters printed in real time throughout the festival. Alongside the installation, our Creative Director Matteo Bonera took the stage with his talk Orientation in the Age of Access, while a series of conversations and talks from international speakers opened up reflections on AI, creativity, and the evolving role of design.
Looking back, what remains is a broader exchange of perspectives, ideas we resonated with, questions we share, and insights that continue to shape how we think about design today. v
Turning talks into landscapes
At the center of our experience at DDD was Talkscapes, the project we presented throughout the festival.
The idea originated from our internal Digital Design Talks, discussions where guests share ideas and perspectives with our team. On the back of these internal events, we asked ourselves: how can a talk leave behind something more than a memory?
This is how we invented Talkscapes. Each Talkscape starts from the speaker’s words. Text analysis, recurring concepts and semantic relationships of the talk are transformed into generative mountain landscapes, where the structure of the terrain reflects the structure of the speech itself.
The audience then becomes part of the process. After each talk, participants answered questions about how the speech made them feel and what it inspired them to do next. Their responses shaped the colors of each poster, turning every output into a visual interpretation of both the talk and the collective reaction around it.
More than 2000 Talkscapes posters were printed during the event, representing the talks of each of each of the festival’s speakers. The landscapes generated where shaped by language, interpretation, emotion, and collective participation.
What emerged over the three days was a growing archive of visual traces — moments translated into landscapes through data, language, and perception.
Leaving a trace
During the festival, our Creative Director Matteo Bonera also brought these reflections to the stage through his talk Orientation in the Age of Access.
The talk explored how our relationship with the world is increasingly mediated by platforms, interfaces, and temporary access rather than ownership. We move through streams of information continuously — saving, consuming, sharing, scrolling — often without truly retaining experiences.
In this context, information design becomes more than visualization. It becomes a way of creating orientation within complexity: tools that help people not only access information, but interpret it.
Talkscapes was born from that same tension.
Even though the project relies on data analysis, generative systems, and digital infrastructures, its final output is intentionally physical: a printed poster designed to exist outside the screen, to age, to remain.
Because in a moment where so much creative output disappears instantly into endless digital flows, leaving behind a tangible trace can still feel like a radical design gesture.
A festival framed by questions
This year’s edition of DDD felt less like a celebration of tools and more like an open conversation about what it means to design nowadays.
Across talks and informal discussions, one theme kept resurfacing: the growing impact of AI on the digital design industry. Not simply as a new set of tools, but as a shift in the way creative work is imagined, produced, and valued.
Some speakers explored this transformation from a technological perspective, others from a deeply human one.
The opening speech by Filippo Spiezia carried the same emotional weight. Celebrating ten years of Digital Design Days, it reflected not only on the growth of the event itself, but on the evolution of an entire creative community built around it.
The talk by Stefan Sagmeister was one of the most emotional moments of the festival: a reminder that beauty still matters, and that designers should continue pursuing it intentionally, even in a culture increasingly driven by speed and optimization.
Other conversations moved between experimentation and uncertainty: AI-generated interfaces, procedural design systems, new creative workflows that attempt to keep humans “in the loop” while automation accelerates production more than ever before.
A feeling became increasingly clear throughout the festival: accessibility and speed are no longer enough on their own. Today almost anyone can generate images, videos, interfaces, or visual systems. What makes the difference is still vision — the ability to interpret, connect, and give meaning to complexity.
