If you thought design fairs were stuffy rooms full of people in turtlenecks pretending to understand chairs, Copenhagen's Other Circle is here to aggressively prove you wrong.
The second edition of the exhibition just wrapped up at The Lab - a genuinely enormous multi-venue space outside the city centre that, based on descriptions reported by Dezeen, sounds like someone converted a small municipality into a design showroom. And honestly? Good. Design deserves that kind of drama.
So what actually went on in there?
Other Circle this year pulled together a fascinatingly eclectic mix of participants. We're talking Claude AI (yes, the chatbot) sharing floor space with emerging Norwegian designers and the kind of buzzy smaller studios that your design-school friend will not stop mentioning at dinner parties. It's the sort of lineup that sounds chaotic on paper but probably made a lot of sense once you were standing inside it.
The organisers framed their curatorial vision around drawing inspiration from "creative culture as a whole" - which is either a beautifully open-minded approach to curation or the world's most ambitious mood board, depending on how cynical you're feeling today.
Why this actually matters
Here's the thing about design fairs - the interesting ones stop being just about objects and start being about ideas. When you put an AI company next to a scrappy emerging studio from Oslo, you're not just filling floor space. You're making an argument about where creativity is coming from right now and, more importantly, where it's going.
Other Circle seems to understand that design in 2025 doesn't live in a vacuum. It's in conversation with tech, with culture, with the kind of small independent studios that are doing genuinely weird and interesting things outside the traditional commercial pipeline. That's a harder curatorial position to hold than just booking the usual suspects, and it's worth respecting.
The venue flex
Worth noting: they came back to The Lab again this year. When a fair returns to a location that massive, outside the city centre no less, it means the energy was right the first time. People made the trip. The space worked. That's not nothing - plenty of ambitious design events have collapsed under the weight of their own logistical ambitions.
Copenhagen continues to quietly position itself as Europe's most interesting design capital, one warehouse takeover at a time. Other Circle is doing its part - chaotic lineup, giant space, and a genuine curiosity about what "creative culture as a whole" actually means right now.
We're into it.
