11 December 2026, CTRL Park Amsterdam
TH/NGS 2026. We have set the date and location. We return to CRCL Park in Amsterdam. It was such a good match last year. Friday, 11 December 2026.
The ingredients will be roughly the same: inspiring workshops and keynotes, a lively exhibition, and a lot of interesting people to connect with! Bringing together the best of designers and makers, as academics or professionals, in the Internet of Things, connected environments, and physical and embodied AI.
TH/NGS 2026 – Things That Care
The theme this year is Things That Care. We will flesh this out a bit more, but as a point of departure:
For over 10 years, ThingsCon has been the platform for makers, designers, who design, create, and question responsible technology for the hybrid physical-digital world. We are witnessing major shifts in both technology and society today: with the rise of ‘physical AI’, we are increasingly living alongside ‘things’ that are not only supposedly intelligent, but also, more and more often, autonomous. Artificial intelligence is leaving the screen and entering the physical world: buildings, infrastructure, cars, objects. This is creating an important new design space in which critical makers and thinkers play a crucial role.
With ‘Things that Care’, we aim to explore this space and play a leading role in shaping the agenda. How can physical AI be designed and used so that it becomes ‘caring’ towards local communities and the planet as a whole? Together with makers and thinkers, we want to make the possibilities and risks of this field tangible and open to discussion. The aim is to sharpen the debate on, and the design process for, intelligent and autonomous things before these systems are embedded in code, infrastructure and society.
With this theme, we build upon the themes and path of the last few years. With the focus on regenerative strategies, we think we make this even more concrete in the things we design, aiming to do more than function. We hope to inspire our community to sharpen the theme during the TH/NGS 2026 conference for hopefully follow-up programs and explorations.
Invitations for proposals
As always, we invite our community to propose workshops, interactive sessions, keynotes, and exhibition entries. Can be your own project, or things we should not miss.
Please use this form to send your suggestions. We will do a first selection beginning of October.