Config 2025
How AI and human creativity shared the spotlight at Europe’s first in-person Figma Festival
Exploring Figma Config 2025 in London
Last month, Nick, our Creative Director, and Steph, our UX Lead, attended Config 2025, the first ever in-person European Figma festival, held at ExCeL London. Figma’s influence on the design and tech community is now so extensive that the event drew creatives from across Europe, representing a wide range of design and creative specialisms.
A day dominated by AI in design
But despite its breadth of appeal, there was really one overriding theme that stitched through the whole day. As with many events this year, that theme was AI. The day started, as many tech conferences do, with a preview of new Figma updates. There were too many to list in full, but some of the most exciting additions focused on AI-powered prompt-to-code features. These tools help creatives rapidly prototype interactions, improving designer–developer collaboration and furthering Figma’s mission to bridge the gap between design and development.
Creatives grapple with AI's impact on the industry
On the flipside of the positive AI developments, much of the rest of the day was tinged with the anxiety many creatives currently feel about how about how AI is reshaping creative careers. Talks by Vish Kapoor and Kishan Koriya from Lloyds, Giuseppe Perri and Adam Morris from Volvo and The Economist, and Stine Bauer Dahlberg from Polaroid addressed this head-on. They highlighted the strategic value of creative professionals, far beyond traditional design tasks. Themes included:
• The role of creatives in stakeholder management
• Building repeatable systems for business efficiency
• Contributing to new product innovation
• The irreplaceable human perspective in decision-making
Inspiration and Innovation
We were then treated to an absolute deluge of inspiration that displayed that creativity is not by any means dead, conversely we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible. The brilliantly bonkers talk “The Web hasn’t happened yet” from Nick Jones and Devin Jacoviello, looked at the opportunity for leftfield creative exploration of what a website could be once you throw off the shackles of “best practice” – 20 minutes of pure joy and silliness.
Ningfei Ou, from Google, delivered a surprisingly positive talk on the dirty tricks and dark patterns that have become too accepted within the user experience of online experiences, and left us considering why we should accept inferior experiences as ‘the norm’.
Meanwhile, Timothy Achumba, of Microsoft spoke of how he had used tools he had little mastery of to explore his passion and create a side hustle designing physical products through applying passion, ideas and utilising whatever he could get his hands on to progress.
Finally, Gary Hustwit of Anamorph spoke about ripping up and reinventing long accepted formats through his work, creating a film that has no beginning, middle or end, no fixed edit. Using generative techniques, the edit shifts every time it plays. An illustration that as we enter more and more formulated worlds, as AI is used to shortcut, and regurgitate past creativity based on what has worked before, human creativity and creatives will always remain as the true trailblazers, that this is not the end but merely a new beginning for how we value and utilise the creative mind.
