Dubai Design Week is an ambitious global design event just in its second year. But you wouldn’t know it while looking across the numerous venues connecting the show. Throughout our stay, the city’s design corridors were abuzz with international brands, style ambassadors, and designers socializing around the tentpole of design. Multinational design and luxury brands like IKEA and Audi intermingled with boutique designers from around the globe, communicating a serious intent to establish Dubai Design Week as an annual destination on the radar of the design community.
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A prominent part of the weeklong event was the Global Grad Show, a showcase coinciding with the announcement of the Dubai Institute of Design & Innovation. The event offered attendees a peek at the next generation of young design talent from 50 universities from 30 countries – the world’s largest student gathering.
From Global Grad Show Curator, Brendan McGetrick:
The projects that we’re exhibiting at Global Grad Show reveal design in its purest and most potentially valuable form. They are by no means indifferent to aesthetics, but their impulse is fundamentally humanitarian: they apply creativity and technical rigor to expand life’s possibilities. In the process, they provide a key to better understanding the world and its enormous diversity of experiences.
145 projects were on display, with projects representing the design programs at schools such as Cambridge University, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, MIT Media Lab, Pratt University, the Royal College of Art, Samsung Art and Design Institute, Rhode Island of School of Design, and many more. Much of what was on display incorporated the latest in software, hardware, and manufacturing technologies, some merely conceptual, but numerous near ready for manufacturing.
LAP by Yi-Ting Wang Naohito Okude, Moe Kobayashi, Yiting Wang, Hiroki Urase, Narihiro Haneda, Naoya Hayashi, Ryo Kashiwagi: A two-seater electric scooter designed specifically for couples, from the Keio University, Graduate School of Media Design.
Micro Wind Turbine by Nils Ferber: What was refreshing about the Dubai Design Week Global Grad Show was the pragmatic utility of many of the concepts on display. As imaginative as the designs were, the purpose and motivations were adherent to the idea design should make the world better. Case in point: a collapsible and lightweight wind powered turbine for basecamp charging.
Biomaterials & Acoustics by Luca Alessandrini: You wouldn’t know it, but the instrument being played above was made with a mixture including spider silk. Luca Alessandrini, a postgraduate from the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College, looked to nature to construct a violin impregnated with silk gathered from the Australian golden orb spider. The composite produces a warm and customizable acoustic character closer to wood than any carbon fibre.
Synchrony by Kenneth Tay: The subtle water drop undulations of the device tempt touch. And that was the exact intention of Synchrony, a therapeutic music platform intended to create a physical and musical communication tool between parent and children with autism. The soft silicone “drum skin” invites improvisational back and forth expression, opening up doors where words sometimes fail.
SOURCE: DESIGN-MILK
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