POV Budapest is back for a third edition with an identity made to move

POV Budapest is Hungary’s first design conference, founded by two local studios – CM.SUPPLY and COMET – who saw a gap in their own city, rich in culture yet without a platform to gather its design community. It debuted in 2024 to 700 attendees from over 50 countries, and returns for its third edition at the National Dance Theatre in Millenáris Park, on the greener Buda side of the river. On the conference’s identity, CM.SUPPLY’s Mátyás Czél tells us that it “works like the city – it accrues, it doesn’t reset.” Most of what has been established in 2024 and 2025 is present, such as the bright red-orange, the type-forward system and the institutional socialist-modernist character that’s there with a bit of irony. What the 2026 update adds is behaviour. “An identity that only looks a certain way feels incomplete,” Czél continues, “ours should also act” – so instead of redrawing the system, the team gave it a disposition, a way of moving with intent. That thinking follows the conference’s 2026 theme, ‘The Act.’ Design systems built to scale have begun moving out of controlled environments and into cities, organisations, services and daily routines, where they run under real conditions and take their shape from use, interpretation and circumstance. Guidelines become values and values become behaviour – how a service responds under pressure, what it prioritises, how its principles drive decisions at scale. To give a thing an identity, the theme proposes, is now partly to give it a way of acting, and to accept that it will act beyond its makers.