Dezeen interviews Dubai Design Week's organisers in a series of specially-commissioned films
Cyril Zammit, Director of Design at Art Dubai Group explains how the inaugural Dubai Design Week aimed to establish the city as a global design center in the first movie from a series produced by Dezeen for Dubai Design Week.
"Dubai Design Week is a platform for a lot of brand new talent from the region and, because it's Dubai, a very strong and open exchange platform with the world," says Cyril.
The second movie of the series focuses on the first Global Grad Show: an exhibition of 50 graduate projects from 10 international design schools across Europe, America and Asia, including London's Royal College of Art, Swiss college ÉCAL and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) arranged into seven categories: health, home, work, play, energy, construction and memory.
Curated by Brendan McGetrick, the exhibition features groundbreaking works from the world's leading design schools brought together for the first time and focuses on ideas as opposed to a series of beautiful objects.
"What we're trying to do with Global Grad Show is show design that's not aesthetic-driven but idea-driven," Brendan explains. "What's exciting about a student show is not that you're seeing immaculate things. You're seeing prototypes that could be further developed, either by the students or somebody else."
The third and final movie features Abwab creative director Rawan Kashkoush who describes how the six pavilions showcased the "differences and nuances" of design from the United Arab Emirates and surrounding countries: Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.
Abwab means "doors" in Arabic. Rawan says the idea was to create a platform to highlight the diversity of design talent in the region.
"It's not just access into the cultures that come from each of these countries," she explains."It's also the culture being taken outside into the rest of the world to really set apart the differences and nuances between each of these countries, which are often perceived as an area or a region."
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