Dubai Design Week 2026

The 12th edition of Dubai Design Week 2026 is under way at Dubai Design District (d3) and runs until Sunday 8 November. The festival opened on 3 November with exhibitions, commissions, installations, talks, workshops and activations spread across the district. It is free to attend and open to visitors of all ages, from 10 am to 10 pm every day.

Abwab: In Other Words

Abwab, Arabic for doors, is the festival’s commissioning programme for practitioners from West, South, Southeast and East Asia and from Africa, with pavilions reshaped every year around a new theme. More than 180 designers have taken part so far. This year’s group exhibition, In Other Words, looks at communication beyond speech and writing through five practices: Varussi’s Taleem draws on the coded notation of Kashmiri carpet and Kani shawl weaving, Kanaka Raghavan’s Cheent Devanagari rethinks Devanagari type through block printing, Grace Shieh treats handmade paper as a language, Dalia Rafeh stretches the Arabic letter shin into a line of red light, and UBIK turns fragments of a Philip K. Dick text into image and rhythm.

Urban Commissions

The annual Urban Commissions competition produces outdoor infrastructure for the district. Under the theme Atmospheres, which asks how light, temperature, sound and material shape the way a place feels, the winning scheme is Three Gardens and a Room by NAO Architects, the Dubai practice founded by Reem Nassour in 2023. It arranges three gardens around a shared room, built from four basic conditions: roof, mound, hearth and enclosure. The jury included ARKAT, Dominique Petit-Frère, Manijeh Verghese and Vanessa Norwood.

Fair, installations and market

Downtown Design, the region’s fair for contemporary design, runs from 4 to 8 November and is the only ticketed part of the week. It is open to the public from 5 to 8 November, from noon to 8 pm and until 6 pm on Sunday. According to Dezeen, installations across d3 come from practices including Nikken Sekkei, Sobokuya, Aestudio and Rasha Saffarini, and Woods Bagot presents an exhibition on 25 years of design in the Middle East. The Marketplace for regional makers takes place on 7 and 8 November.

Getting there

The nearest metro station is Dubai Mall / Burj Khalifa, from where RTA bus D03 stops at Dubai Design District. The festival is held under the patronage of Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, chairperson of Dubai Culture. The full programme is on the Dubai Design Week website.