Two days in Berlin: iF Design Award Night and Trend Conference 2026 

April 29, 2026

Celebrating our Qwello win - and the international design community that shows up around it.

On 27 April, our co-founder Roman Gebhard joined more than 2.000 guests from 42 countries at the Friedrichstadt-Palast in Berlin for the iF Design Award Night 2026. On the world's largest theatre stage, the year's gold winners received their trophies, and design legend Patricia Urquiola was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award. For us, the evening was the moment to celebrate something we had announced in March: our 2026 iF Design Award for Qwello's CP21 and CP22 charging stations - shared with the Qwello team in front of the winners' wall.

The next morning, the iF Design Trend Conference at AXICA picked up the energy in a different register. The single-day programme circled the relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence, and three talks in particular shaped how we are thinking about the year ahead:

Branko Lukic (Cognitive Architecture, California) on Perfect Flaw: When Imperfection Becomes Gold - a case for designing with rather than against the human evidence in our work.
Borja Martínez Pérez (LO SIENTO, Barcelona) on Hand Thinking - the slow, tactile reasoning that screens cannot replace, even now.
Mouna Andraos & Melissa Mongiat (Daily tous les jours, Montreal) on Strangers Need Strange Moments Together - public-space interventions that turn unfamiliar people into temporary communities.

Each talk approached a different angle of a question we keep coming back to at FLUID: what stays human as the tools change. None of them gave a tidy answer. All three made the question sharper.

Beyond the stages, both days carried something the iF programme always does well: the international design community in one place. Two days of running into former colleagues, long-time collaborators, current and past clients, and friends from across Europe and beyond - the kind of unplanned conversations that can only happen at a forum like this.

Thanks to Uwe Cremering, Frank Zierenberg and the fabulous iF Design Award Team, to the jury, and to the colleagues and partners who made both days what they were.

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