What’s in store for this year’s Design Days Dubai

Design Days Dubai is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year, with the 2016 edition of the event taking place in Downtown Dubai from March 14 to 18.

The Strong Chair by Atelier Van Lieshout. Courtesy Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Jens Praet’s Shredded side table is now a permanent resident in the Mint Museum of Charlotte, North Carolina. Attendees of the 2013 edition of Design Days Dubai may remember the piece – it was constructed during the show, from shredded magazines, as part of a public workshop called Shredded Wares. Alongside the table in its new American home is a plaque describing how it was donated to the museum by DDD. It’s a small but poignant marker of how far the fair has come – and another pin in the map highlighting the growing reach of Dubai’s maturing design scene.

Read more: Emirati designers Khalid Shafar and Aljoud Lootah talk Design Days Dubai

DDD is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year, with the 2016 edition of the event taking place in Downtown Dubai from March 14 to 18. Given how influential it has been in the evolution of the UAE’s design scene, it’s a milestone worth marking.

The first person that the fair’s director, Cyril Zammit, went to see when he was planning the inaugural edition of DDD was Khalid Shafar. Shafar is now the UAE’s best-known and most prolific product designer, but at the time, he was also the only one. By contrast, this year’s edition of DDD will feature an exhibition called Wasl, showcasing dozens of designs created by Emirati or UAE-based designers since 2012. It’s a retrospective, of sorts, but mainly a reminder of how far the industry here has come in a short space of time.

“It is the perfect format to showcase creativity from the UAE. It’s great to see this in only five years. Because when we started, there was really only Khalid Shafar,” Zammit says.

See more: 15 favourite designs from Design Days Dubai

The pieces tell their own story about how the UAE’s design scene has evolved. Anecdotally, the majority are by women: “We have found that this country is producing more female designers than male, which is certainly not the worldwide trend,” Zammit says.

There’s also growing diversity, not only in the profile of the designers themselves, but also in the nature of the pieces being created. “The very first pieces we saw from the UAE were very tribal; everything was very strongly rooted in the culture of the country,” Zammit says. “The younger generation of designers doesn’t necessarily look at it like that. They are starting to detach themselves. I think this is important. When you look at Dutch designers or French designers, some of them have a narrative about their own country, but very few. You have a school of Dutch design that includes a lot of different nationalities living in the Netherlands, or a school of French artisans, but they are not only talking about their own country.”

The absence of an entrenched design tradition in the UAE is often levelled as a criticism, but it can just as easily be viewed as a positive, Zammit says.

Read more: Highlights to watch for at this year's event

“Here, we are coming from a nomadic background, so 100 years ago, there was no need for furniture and adornments. Which obviously makes the situation more challenging for people trying to establish a design tradition in the UAE. But it also means that we are not stuck in tradition. Sometimes, when you repeat folklore, you do not invent new things.”

Similarly, while there’s an element of retrospection to the fifth anniversary of DDD, there’s plenty of forward movement, too. While big-name galleries such as ­Carpenters Workshop Gallery and Victor Hunt Designart will again act as linchpins of the event, setting the bar for quality and creativity, more and more space is being made for smaller, regional galleries and designers.

With 47 exhibitors from 20 countries, showcasing 782 objects by 182 designers, this will be the largest edition of DDD to date, cementing its position as the strongest and most diverse platform for contemporary design in the world.

“There is no other fair that shows as much contemporary design as we do,” Zammit says. “By contemporary, we mean five to 10 years old, maximum. The majority of shows, such as Design Miami, show vintage or modern design from the 50s and 60s, because the market responds well to that there.”

It was originally envisaged DDD would do the same, but the specific nature of the market quickly dictated otherwise. “This is probably a learning curve for everyone – you can’t import something in,” Zammit says. “The city is so specific. You have such a different diversity, and you have to respond to that. It’s an emerging market; you have people who know about design and people who don’t, but they are all curious to know what we are talking about.”

It’s also true that there’s still not an established tradition of investing in design in the UAE, but ­Zammit prefers it that way. “I’d rather stick to an emerging market like this, where people are using their heart to buy. Buying purely with the aim of making a return demystifies the creativity and artistic side of it.

“This remains a market of very spontaneous buyers. But even 15 or 20 years ago in the US, there was no collecting movement when it came to design. There were only art collectors. Design Miami really created this deeper movement of collecting. It could very well happen here. The majority of people here are still spontaneous buyers, but we do see them buying one piece, and then coming back the year after looking for more.”

Either way, awareness and understanding of high-end, collectable design has developed considerably since Zammit met with Shafar at Dubai’s Lime Tree Cafe all those years ago. “There was the perception that design is a purely functional object. We joked in the first year that people thought we were just a super-expensive furniture show. Yes, we sell chairs and tables, but not only. But I think people understood very quickly. Returning exhibitors saw an immediate maturing of the market from the first to second year. Now, it’s even stronger.”