Days to Amaze
Dubai’s premiere Design Week is bringing the region’s top designs to a global audience. The world will be watching as the first-ever Dubai Design Week (26-31 October) enters the international design conversation. With more than 60 separate activities and projects, including educational talks, lectures and workshops – as well as installations and exhibitions – Dubai will secure its standing as the region’s design capital.
Owned and managed by Art Dubai Group, the six-day event, coinciding with Dubai’s Downtown Design fair, will activate events, activities and projects within Dubai Design District (d3) and across the city, celebrating the best in design, both regionally and internationally. With partner d3, it will inaugurate every creative aspect of the design, fashion and luxury industries.
Abwab (meaning ‘ doors’) is a landmark feature this year, with interactive design journeys through design exhibitions from different countries using the theme ‘Games: The Element of Play in Culture’. Housed in individual pavilions, nations will reveal their design culture by interpreting traditional games and highlighting inventive play.
Dubai-based architecture firm Loci Architecture + Design will design this year’s pavilions for Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Tunisia and Pakistan. Each will celebrate its national design aesthetic, including spatial design, furniture, industrial, lighting and graphic design – all within d3.
To secure and maintain a truly global audience, Dubai Design Week and Downtown Design will be showcasing young design brands from six other design-week cities: Beijing, Helsinki, Istanbul, Melbourne, Mexico City and San Francisco.
The next generation of designers will make their debut at the Global Grad Show. This world-premiere exhibition, encompassing 10 of the world’s leading design schools, will feature 40 projects organised into six categories – Construction, Health, Home, Memory, Play and Work – all presented together under the title ‘The Future of...’
Design Week will also feature the premiere of Iconic City, the annual exhibition to explore a selected Middle East and South Asian city. This year’s city exhibition, ‘ Brilliant Beirut’, curated and designed by Beirut-born and based designer Rana
Power Glove designed by Morten Grønning Nielsen Salam, will be the first attempt to document the development of design in the Lebanese capital over the past seven decades since independence (1950s-2010s).
The region’s retailers and galleries will also be participating. The Rug Company, in association with The Odd Piece, which specialises in vintage, mid-century modern and contemporary furnishings, will highlight new collections that will soon be available in their gorgeous new space in Alserkal Avenue.
Etqaan will hold its official launch and showroom opening in d3 with its selection of Egyptian artisanal, high-end furniture. The company will debut its new collection with a contemporary edge, a collaboration with Abu Dhabi-based designer Fouad Mirza.
Cities boutique, a sponsor to the Saudi Pavilion, will hold an in-store exhibition celebrating colour in design, ‘The Power of Color’, which will include pieces from French artists Dominique Capocci and Alain Salomon, Duffy London of the UK, and Polart from the United States and Mexico.