The Second WHO Traditional Medicine Summit was held in New Delhi from December 17th to 19th, 2025 at Bharat Mandapam, focusing on advancing evidence-based traditional practices under the theme "Restoring Balance: The science and practice of health and well-being”. Spread across 100,000 sq ft, the Summit engaged 100+ country delegations represented by 100 ministers. Organized by the WHO and India's Ministry of Ayush, it brought together global experts to integrate traditional medicine into mainstream health systems. The Traditional Medicine Discovery Experience alone brought together 111 subject experts across disciplines and geographies with a coherent narrative. Operating across seven official languages, the Summit reached thousands of participants both on ground and online. 

Large global projects are often described through numbers and milestones. You are rarely given the inside story — where dozens of cultures, protocols, belief systems, and deadlines are colliding in real time, and the margin for failure is almost zero. What is the on-the-ground reality of designing at a global scale? What are the inherent challenges? What were the parameters which we had to fulfil, without fail, to achieve overall excellence? How much does client-designer partnership and trust matter in foundational innovation? Here are five key learnings that shaped up as we set out to create our studio’s most massive project yet in India’s capital city, across media and spaces, professions and cultures, governments and organizations, to win hearts and minds. 

Learning 1: Strategic framework and Conceptual direction make the cutting-edge differentiation

Lopez was entrusted with bringing the vision of Restoring Balance to life. Our design studio played a pivotal role across multiple touchpoints, including Branding, Concept Renders, Conceptual Framework & Strategic Direction, Experience and Exhibition Design, Event Design, Graphic Design, Website Interface, and overarching Creative Direction. The visual strategy drew from the fibonacci curve and its presence across Nature, making a self-explanatory statement about how mathematics, science and Nature are inherently connected. This became the channel for the core experiences, connecting all visual metaphors.  

“Across video, film and performance, carry-home mementoes, poster graphics, exhibit panels, website and peripherals, the fibonacci curve came alive bringing together the visual story coherently, under one umbrella. This is the power of brand strategy when conceptualised and thought-through well: it becomes engaging when implemented at scale to connect with delegates, governments, and people from all walks of life”.

Learning 2: Speaking for great numbers means great responsibility to every member

The Second WHO Global Summit on Traditional Medicine was positioned as a vital platform to validate traditional medicine’s benefits by aligning with scientific approaches, policy and regulatory frameworks towards WHO’s vision of ‘Health for All’. This was a place of convergence, bringing together global leaders, researchers and practitioners to accelerate collaboration for system-level change. All communications at the convention had to speak for this shift of traditional medicine from the periphery to the center.

“Creating inclusive communications meant we had to be responsive and nuanced, allowing for the design system to be open and flexible, not rigid. When Indigenous partners requested the image of an ancient Baobab tree on a wall to revive the “energy”  — something that was not earlier planned — our team located a large-format vinyl press overnight to bring this powerful cultural symbol into the exhibit.”
 

Learning 3: Communicating complex issues requires integration, not compartmentalization

The project’s vast implementation proved our deep belief in design thinking for holistic approaches and advocacy of design as an enabler.  Instead of breaking down the intent to operate in silos, we chose to deploy design as the central force bringing together multiple partners and workstreams, aligning stakeholders, and reducing the distance between intent and execution. Spanning geographies, cultures, institutions, and systems, across 111 stakeholders representing over 100+ countries, design became an integrating mechanism through which complex requirements were organized, negotiated, and translated into action. Our immersion in strategic decision-making brought us closer to the project’s core purpose: to build alignment across different stakeholders and enable a shared global vision to move forward with clarity and coherence.

“The Timeline Wall in Zone 1 alone carried 12,500 years of medical history, across nearly 130 visuals, each passing through 10–12 rounds of international approvals. And this was just one section. Across four zones, the studio was managing northern and southern constellations, five research labs with 276 panels, 21 exhibition walls in Zone 3, plant-tea labels, specimen jars, digital interfaces to gather crowds, while constantly shifting content. All of this had to be done in coordination with WHO teams across time zones, ministries, and Indigenous representatives.”

Editor-in-Chief: Sujatha Shankar Kumar

Written by: Sukanya Panda, Vishal Goyal, Somasundaram W