October 21, 2025 | DESIGN & INTERIORS
DUBAI DESIGN WEEK,
UP CLOSE
words Onur Basturk
Now in its 11th year, Dubai Design Week continues to shape the region’s creative landscape as a hub for ideas, innovation, and cultural exchange. Taking place from 4–9 November 2025 in strategic partnership with Dubai Design District (d3) and supported by Dubai Culture, this edition presents a dynamic line-up of exhibitions, installations, and talks. We sat down with director Natasha Carella to discuss its evolving curatorial vision and how design can inspire more human-centred futures..
THIS YEAR BUILDS ON OUR HUMAN-CENTRED APPROACH
What do you see as the defining theme of 2025?
Rather than centering the festival around a single theme, our approach is guided by a set of principles that shape how we curate each edition. The first is a commitment to high-quality, original design that contributes meaningfully to the global discourse. The second is ensuring that what we present reflects the creative voices of the SWANA region and the wider Global South, in dialogue with international perspectives. And the third is exploring how design can actively contribute to building better futures—socially, culturally, and environmentally. Design spans a wide range of disciplines, from architecture and interiors to urban planning, graphics, product, and industrial design. The festival aims to reflect this diversity through an extensive programme of exhibitions, installations, special commissions, product launches, activations, workshops, talks, and our two anchor fairs, Downtown Design and Editions. Together, they showcase design’s ability to bridge scales—from the intimate and material to the systemic and civic.
This year, the curatorial direction builds on a more reflective and human-centred approach that we’ve been nurturing in recent years. It looks at design not only as a practice of innovation but as a social connector—how it helps us live together, communicate, and care for one another and for the world around us. In that sense, it’s less about defining a trend and more about reaffirming design’s role as a shared language that can imagine and shape more inclusive and interconnected futures.
How will this human-centred approach shape the experience for visitors and participants?
Much of our programming this year is intentionally research-driven and multidisciplinary, exploring how design can respond to human and environmental contexts.
In Abwab, themed In the Details, Bahrain’s Maraj Studio revisits ornamentalism as a form of storytelling. Their winning pavilion, Stories of the Isle and the Inlet, uses embroidered mesh inspired by thob al nashil to narrate the threatened ecology of an island off Bahrain’s coast. It’s a powerful example of how detail and decoration can become a language for preserving cultural memory.
Similarly, Urban Commissions 2025, themed Courtyard, invites designers to reimagine this archetype as a site of connection. The winning proposal by Some Kind of Practice reinterprets Emirati housh typologies into new shared spatial solutions, highlighting how design can cultivate belonging and collective experience.
Other programming extends this approach, connecting design with sound, ecology, and performance. Projects such as Ajzal—a contemporary interpretation of the majlis—reflect on the act of gathering, while Nikken Sekkei’s collaboration with a local woodworking family celebrates craftsmanship and the people behind the process. The d3 Architecture Exhibition, organised in partnership with RIBA, explores how architecture intersects with community, further underscoring the festival’s human focus.
We also seek to expand dialogue beyond design audiences. Multidisciplinary initiatives like Bootleg Griot, whose programming weaves storytelling, music, and migration narratives, and our inclusion of book clubs, spoken-word poets, educators, and philosophers, encourage wider public engagement.
REGIONAL TALENT LIES AT THE HEART OF DUBAI DESIGN WEEK
Regional talent has always been central to the festival. How does DDW 2025 highlight designers from the Middle East alongside international names?
Regional talent is central to the ethos of Dubai Design Week. Each edition is designed to spotlight the creative intelligence within the Middle East and the wider Global South, while positioning these voices in dialogue with international names.
We work closely with design initiatives and institutions that nurture creative communities year-round—such as Art Jameel and the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) from Saudi Arabia, Design Doha in Qatar, and the UAE National Pavilion. Each plays a vital role in supporting designers who explore material innovation and identity in ways deeply rooted in place. This year’s programme continues to build on those relationships while introducing new ones.
Downtown Design, the festival’s headline fair, remains the most significant platform for contemporary design in the region. Alongside international names such as Kartell, Vitra, Stellar Works, and Roche Bobois, it features strong regional representation through showcases by Tashkeel’s Tanween Programme, 1971 Design Space, and MAKE’s Athath Fellowship. The UAE Designer Exhibition, supported by Dubai Culture, expands mentorship for emerging designers and introduces Lebanese designer Nada Debs as its headline mentor.
The festival will also host the culmination of several award platforms that recognise excellence and innovation across the region. The inaugural d3 Awards focus on architecture, celebrating emerging talent in the MENA region, while the RIBA Gulf Future Architects Awards spotlight architectural innovation and education. Together, these initiatives create pathways for new voices to be seen alongside established ones, reinforcing Dubai’s role as a bridge for design talent across the region and beyond.
DESIGN WEEKS PLAY AN ESSENTIAL CULTURAL AND SOCIAL ROLE
In your view, where does Dubai Design Week stand among global events like Milan Design Week or London Design Festival—and what cultural and social role do design weeks play today?
At their core, design weeks around the world share a purpose: to convene communities, exchange ideas, and explore how design can shape our collective future. We have deep respect for other design weeks—each reflects its own context and audience, and all play a vital role in strengthening the global design ecosystem.
Dubai Design Week is part of that landscape. What distinguishes our approach is a focus on nuance, diversity, and cultural context. We aim to highlight non-Western communities and markets, and to reflect the richness and complexity of geographies that are sometimes underrepresented or viewed through a limited lens in global conversations.
Thanks to Dubai’s unique positioning—culturally, geographically, and economically—we are able to foster collaborations that cut across regions and disciplines, resulting in projects that are both locally grounded and globally resonant. We also strive to reveal the subtleties within regions, showcasing the layers within cultures and subcultures that are often flattened by broader narratives.
The festival brings together leading international names—from architectural firms and global design brands to cultural institutions and creative businesses—alongside designers, thinkers, and collectives from across the SWANA region and the wider Global South. The dialogue that emerges between these communities is one of reciprocity rather than contrast: an exchange of methodologies, material cultures, and worldviews that together expand how we imagine design’s role in society.
Beyond that, design weeks play an essential cultural and social role. They create key moments in the calendar where designers, institutions, and brands share the results of their year-round programming, launch new products, and reconnect with peers across the global design ecosystem. In Dubai, that moment of convergence brings together architects, designers, educators, businesses, and the public—creating an exchange that extends beyond industry. It becomes a space where ideas circulate, collaborations take root, and new networks form, ultimately strengthening the creative and cultural economy as a whole.
And importantly, we hope to build more relationships across the global design ecosystem, including with other design weeks. We see great value in collaboration over competition and would love to see more cross-platform exchanges that amplify our shared purpose.
