The fifteenth edition of Jerusalem Design Week, Israel's leading public event dedicated to contemporary design, took place from 9–16 July 2026 at the historical Hansen House in Jerusalem. This year's annual theme, Match Point, brought more than 100 designers together, creating dozens of newly commissioned exhibitions, installations and unique projects.

Time and again, we find ourselves moving between victory and defeat. Match Point examined this constant movement through the broad lens of competitive sport—an arena in which ideas of excellence, competition, belonging, discipline, power, and resilience converge.

The rise of sports as a symbolic cultural, social, and political arena positioned design as an integral component therein. Team colors, symbols, flags, fan gear, and uniform shape communities, placing the individual within the collective. Alongside them exists a rich material culture of victory, manifested in trophies, medals, awards, championship ribbons and other objects that serve as a tangible and symbolic expression to achievements. Monitoring and measurement technologies transform movement and achievement into measurable data, reshaping our perception of the body—from one of observation to one of monitoring, comparison, and judgment.

JDW chief curators, Sonja Olitsky and Roni Azgad Hamburger, note: “There are a lot of works that took a critical approach and, through the prism of competitive sport, tried to understand what it means to sustain our morale; why we have to encourage ourselves all the time; what glory is; what victory looks like; and what the significance of the [FIFA World Cup trophy] statuette is.”

Against this backdrop, the exhibition program offered multiple perspectives on these questions: Pit, the central exhibition by HQ Architects, examined the emotional and social dynamics of the sporting arena, exploring the architecture of spectatorship, collective participation, and the psychological intensity generated by competition.

Hall of Fame reflected on ideas of victory and achievement through trophies, medals, commemorative objects, and speculative interpretations of success.

Bringing together works by international and Israeli designers, including Bina Baitel (Paris), Carla Rataus, and Ron Yosef, the articles represented subjective narratives as expressed through the act of design, bringing to light the various aspects of triumph and accomplishment. They invoke a versatile perspective on the concept of glory as it truly is, on a broad range of emotions and practices: triumph may be comical, mournful, absolute or contested, shared by a group or savored alone.

The Matchmaker project, under the artistic direction of Itay Yaakov, continued Jerusalem Design Week's long-running collaborative initiative by pairing Jerusalem-based designers with local football fans. Together, they compile a contemporary situation report of material culture in Jerusalem sports, using clothes, paraphernalia, graphic design and photography.

Additional exhibitions and installations included All Eyes on You by Tokyo-based architecture studio NOIZ; works by Ortal Barel, Micky Keidar, and Merav Ofri Vax; projects developed in collaboration with Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; works by Alexander Frukht; and many other works making their debut at Hansen House.

Alongside the exhibitions, Jerusalem Design Week hosted a public program of lectures, conversations, performances, guided tours, screenings, workshops, and live events, inviting audiences to engage with design across disciplines and perspectives. Throughout the week, Hansen House became a meeting point for designers, researchers, artists, athletes, musicians, and visitors, extending the questions raised by the exhibitions into conversations around identity, community, competition, and culture.