Design Next: The Circular Design Show Where the Best Material Was Already Holding Up the Signage

ART & CULTURE · DUBAI

Reading time: 7 min

The UAE’s first exhibition devoted to the circular economy opened at Dubai Design District with compostable phone cases, plant-derived furniture and an electric motorcycle that generates its own power. The most persuasive material in the building was not in the show at all. It was the palm-waste board holding up Design Week’s own signage.

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Circular design exhibitions set themselves a high bar, and it is worth naming before anything else.

The format encourages the demonstration object: a chair grown from mycelium, a tile pressed from coffee grounds, a lamp made of orange peel. These are genuinely useful as proofs of concept and they photograph superbly. The step beyond them is specification on a real project at real volume, which is where a visitor leaves impressed and an architect leaves with something to put on a schedule.

Design Next, which ran from 5 to 10 November 2024 in Building 6 at Dubai Design District, was the first exhibition in the UAE dedicated to the circular economy. It was a joint initiative between d3, part of TECOM Group, and the Milan-based Isola Design Group, staged during Dubai Design Week’s tenth anniversary edition. It gathered more than 40 independent designers, studios, brands and startups from 18 countries across five thematic areas: Circular Design and Innovative Craft, Material Hub, Future of Urban Living, Design Labs, and The Stage.

Some of what it showed was demonstration. Some of it was not. Telling the difference is the whole point of walking a show like this, and the clearest answer was sitting a few metres outside the door.

The partner is the story

The easiest thing to miss here is why Isola specifically, and the answer runs back to a complaint about booth rents.

Isola Design District was founded in 2016 by Gabriele Cavallaro and Elif Resitoglu, as an extension of their agency Blank Hub, and it began as a straightforward reaction to being priced out. Cavallaro has described the reasoning plainly: “We thought, ‘We should create our own design district, where small design studios with low budgets can take part.’”

They chose Milan’s Isola neighbourhood for its independent character, ran three physical editions from 2017 to 2019, then moved the platform online during the pandemic. By 2022 it carried more than 15,000 users and 650 verified designer profiles with over 1,100 projects uploaded, and that year’s Milan edition gathered over 250 designers across 40 locations.

That history matters because it defines what Isola actually is. It is not a curator with a taste for sustainability. It is an access mechanism, built specifically so that independent designers without marketing budgets can stand alongside established brands.

So when d3 brought Isola to Dubai for its first Middle East project, it was not simply importing an exhibition. It was importing a model for surfacing people who cannot afford a stand at a trade fair. In a design week whose commercial anchor is a furniture fair full of European brands, that is a valuable complement, and it is the reason a show of 40 independent studios could sit credibly inside a festival built around Downtown Design.

The palm frond argument

Here is the thread running through Dubai Design Week 2024 that rewards joining up.

Desert Board, one of the UAE exhibitors at Design Next, manufactures PSB, or Palm Strand Board, described as the world’s first engineered palm-based board made from repurposed palm frond waste. It is made from date palm biomass, which is the single most abundant organic waste stream in the Gulf, generated annually in enormous quantities and historically burned or dumped.

The material specification is the part that matters, because it is written in the language an architect can actually use: zero-emission, formaldehyde-free, fire-rated, high moisture resistance, high load bearing, strong screw withdrawal. It works for soundproofed walls, moisture-resistant doors, fire-retardant construction and both indoor and outdoor applications, and at end of life it can be reused or recycled.

That is not a demonstration object. That is a building product.

And Desert Board is Dubai Design Week’s Sustainable Material Partner, which is why the festival’s own information desk, signage and wayfinding were primarily built from the stuff. Visitors walked past the most convincing circular material at the festival on the way in, without necessarily registering it as an exhibit at all.

Read across the rest of the week and the pattern sharpens. At Downtown Design, Tashkeel’s Tanween programme unveiled a cabinet veneered in dyed palm leaf marquetry and a pendant light spun from palm fibre. Elsewhere in the region’s design vocabulary, arish, the palm frond construction used for centuries in coastal and desert building, keeps resurfacing in contemporary work.

The date palm is doing something no imported sustainability narrative can do here. It is locally abundant, it is a waste stream rather than a crop grown for the purpose, it carries genuine cultural weight, and it has now been engineered into a certified structural board. If the Gulf produces one genuinely regional circular material this decade, this is the strongest candidate, and Design Next was the first exhibition to put that argument in a room.

What else was in the room

The rest of the show ranged across the spectrum from product to proposition.

iGreen, from Italy, showed compostable smartphone cases embedded with plantable seeds, which is the purest form of the demonstration object and none the worse for it, since the point is to make disposability visible.

Sulmi, a UAE startup, showed electric motorcycles combining energy generation and storage in one system, which is a considerably harder engineering problem than it sounds and a more serious proposition than most exhibition pieces.

Generation 3D, also UAE-based, works in large-format additive manufacturing, a technology whose circular argument rests on printing only the material a form actually requires rather than cutting away what it does not. NYXO and Colab represented the local startup and studio scene alongside them.

Regionally, Egyptian designers Aya Moug and Shell Homage brought material research from a country with its own agricultural waste streams to work with. Internationally, exhibitors came from the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Spain, Turkey, India, South Korea, Japan and the United States, with established names Arper and Armourcoat anchoring the commercial end.

The talks programme ran from 6 to 9 November, covering circular practice, artificial intelligence in design, the evolution of Arab design and sustainable architecture, with speakers including Fahad Ahmed Al Obaidly and the architect Wael Al Awar.

Al Awar’s presence is the detail that gives the programme its weight.

Why Wael Al Awar in the room matters

Al Awar, of the studio waiwai, co-curated the UAE’s National Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, where Wetland won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.

The pavilion was not a display about sustainability. It was a material. The team developed a cement alternative that avoids Portland cement entirely, using magnesium-rich brine, a waste product of the UAE’s desalination industry and its sabkha salt flats. Portland cement is responsible for a very large share of global construction emissions, and the pavilion proposed replacing it with something the Emirates produces as waste in vast quantity.

That is the same argument as Palm Strand Board, made in a different waste stream, and it is the highest international recognition UAE design has received.

What happens next

Design Next is planned as a biennial, with d3 Architecture Exhibitions occupying the alternate years. That is a sensible cadence for a materials show, because material development moves slowly and an annual edition would force repetition.

It also sets a clear ambition. The measure of the next edition is not how many countries are represented. It is how many of the 2024 exhibitors have moved from prototype to specification, with a data sheet, a fire rating and a price per square metre.

Khadija Al Bastaki, senior vice president of d3, framed the ambition in almost exactly those terms: “Consumers want to see bold statements around sustainability transform into tangible, accessible reality.” That is the correct standard, and it is a demanding one to have set publicly.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The temptation with a circular design show is to review the ideas, which are always plentiful and always encouraging.

The more useful question is which of them a specifier could act on the following Monday, and by that measure Design Next’s most important exhibitor was the one whose product was already installed around the festival rather than displayed inside it. A board pressed from palm fronds, fire-rated and load bearing, made from the waste of the region’s most common tree.

That is what circular design looks like when it stops being a position and becomes a material. Everything else in the room was somewhere on the road towards it, which is exactly what a first edition should look like.

Bringing Isola in to assemble it was the right instinct too. A show about doing more with less is better staged by the people who built their entire platform because the alternative was too expensive.