Dubai Design Week has matured by focusing on perspective over scale
Dubai Design Week 2025, which begins today and runs until Sunday in Dubai Design District (D3), arrives at a moment when the city’s design ambitions are no longer being underestimated. What began a decade ago as a fledgling regional showcase has matured into one of the most credible stops on the global design calendar; an event that now attracts serious attention from curators, critics and creative directors who once confined their itineraries to Milan or London.
For this year’s edition, the festival’s 11th, international heavyweights such as Kartell, Vitra, and Roche Bobois sit comfortably alongside an increasingly self-assured roster of regional voices. The tone is confident and cosmopolitan – this is not a week for novelties or spectacle but for substance and dialogue. As the director of Dubai Design Week, Natasha Carella, explains, “Our approach is guided by a commitment to high-quality, original design that contributes meaningfully to the global discourse.” That philosophy is visible across the programme, from material-driven experimentation to urban commissions that rethink how public space can foster connection.
Across D3’s courtyards and waterfront terraces, there’s a hum of anticipation. Designers from Sao Paulo to Seoul are setting up installations alongside collectives from Manama and Muscat. The Abwab pavilion, curated around the theme “In the Details”, is among the standouts: Bahrain’s Maraj Studio has woven a delicate, embroidered mesh inspired by the thob al nashil national dress to explain the fragile ecology of Nabih Saleh Island – a poetic intersection of craft and environmental storytelling.
Carella has resisted turning the festival into a single-theme spectacle. Instead, she’s building a framework where design is treated as a civic act as much as a creative one. “We look at design not only as a practice of innovation,” she says, “but as a social connector.” That ambition translates into the details: from low-carbon DuneCrete structures by ARDH Collective to collaborations between Japanese architects Nikken Sekkei and Emirati woodworkers, the work on display emphasises material intelligence and dialogue between cultures.
For observers, the significance of Dubai Design Week lies less in scale than in perspective. It reflects a city that has invested heavily in cultural infrastructure, museums, architecture schools, and public-art initiatives and is now seeing the dividends. The result is a festival that’s as much about exchange as exhibition – a meeting point between emerging nations and established design capitals, between institutional might and independent experimentation.
