Shaping Culture Through Design: An Exclusive Conversation with Natasha Carella
From 4 to 9 November 2025, Dubai will host the 11th edition of Dubai Design Week at Dubai Design District (d3), under the patronage of Her Highness Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The festival will gather more than 1,000 designers and brands, featuring over 30 large-scale installations alongside commissions, exhibitions and immersive activations.
Elen Levitt, Art Curator of World Arabia Magazine, conducted an exclusive interview with Natasha Carella, Director of Dubai Design Week, exploring how design becomes a living infrastructure shaping Dubai's creative future.
Elen Levitt: Dubai Design Week 2025 coincides with the UAE's Year of Community. How do you personally interpret the idea of "community"? Is it about people and environments, or about creating new systems of dialogue, trust and cultural cohesion?
Natasha Carella: Community is best understood as both place and practice — a gathering of people, but also the creation of systems of care, trust and exchange. When we place this in the context of design, community becomes more than a social idea. It becomes something that can be shaped, modelled and made tangible. Design has the ability to convene people in shared spaces, but also to encode cultural memory in form and material.
This is the perspective we bring to Dubai Design Week 2025: community not as a static identity, but as a living infrastructure. You see this reflected across the programme, from commissions that reimagine how we gather, to exhibitions that treat detail as a language of cultural memory.
EL: Over the past years, Dubai Design Week has transformed from a showcase of objects into a living fabric of the city. Would you say it now represents not only a space of things, but also of human stories?
NC: Design is never just about objects or aesthetics. It's a cultural language that tells stories about who we are and how we live. At Dubai Design Week, we approach design as a cross-disciplinary language, bringing together architects, makers, technologists, educators and storytellers.
This is particularly important in a region where narratives of design have often been filtered through external lenses. Our role is to expand those narratives — to show that design from West Asia, South Asia, Africa and the wider Global South is not peripheral, but central to global conversations. By platforming these voices, design becomes a cultural statement: it reflects identity, honours heritage and proposes new ways of addressing shared challenges.
EL: Last year, the Editions art cluster appeared at d3, which many saw as a symbolic turning point. Could this be considered the beginning of a new era — when design moves beyond utility and becomes a carrier of meaning, philosophy and depth?
NC: Editions launched in 2024 as the region's first fair dedicated to limited-edition art and design. Its debut showed the depth of interest across disciplines and confirmed that this is not a passing gesture but the start of something lasting.
Set alongside Downtown Design, it creates a distinct but complementary space where audiences encounter photography, ceramics, prints, works on paper, design and artist multiples together. We saw strong sales, a younger audience entering the market and regional talent presented alongside international names — evidence that art and design can be presented together in ways that are both accessible and rigorous.
EL: Since its inception, the Abwab programme has brought together more than 180 designers. This year, Abwab takes on the theme 'In the Details'. Why do details — ornament, texture, gesture — become keys to memory and identity?
NC: Abwab embodies the ethos of Dubai Design Week. Since its inception, it has commissioned more than 180 designers, leaving a legacy of cultural dialogue and underscoring that regional design is defined by plurality, adaptability and imagination.
This year's theme, 'In the Details', invites designers to focus on material intelligence and cultural nuance through the lens of ornamentalism. Historically, ornamentation was a language of meaning and identity — a way to encode cultural memory, symbolism and philosophical ideas into form and structure. Yet under modernist influence, ornamentation was often dismissed as frivolous. Abwab asks designers to challenge that perception. It reframes ornamentation not as embellishment but as embedded knowledge, a visual system of storytelling that deserves renewed attention. In this way, Abwab becomes both a platform for design and a quiet act of cultural reclamation.
EL: In 2025, Urban Commissions turns to the theme of the 'Courtyard'. How can contemporary designers reinterpret it today — transforming it into a model for new forms of urban living?
NC: Courtyards have long served as places of gathering, reflection, climate control and community life, offering a balance between openness and enclosure, privacy and exchange. This year, designers were invited to reimagine the courtyard as a form of communal urban infrastructure, drawing from its historic role whilst addressing the needs of contemporary cities.
By revisiting the courtyard through the lens of public furniture and modular design, we're asking how this ancient form can respond to modern urban needs, particularly in cities like Dubai, where public life is still evolving. The selected commission will be not only an architectural gesture, but also a prompt for conversation around access, comfort and social cohesion in shared spaces.
EL: Can we say that Dubai Design Week is now actively shaping a new market — where design becomes part of the art scene and a new language of regional culture?
NC: Dubai Design Week did not begin as a simple showcase of objects. From the first year it included commissions like Abwab and Urban Commissions, which were about experimentation and cultural dialogue. What is true is that the festival has continued to evolve. Each edition expands the scope through new platforms, partnerships and themes.
This evolution has created space for design to be understood in multiple ways: as cultural practice, as civic engagement and, increasingly, as part of a growing market. Rather than design becoming part of the art scene, what we see is design asserting its own agency, shaping new markets whilst contributing to the cultural language of the region.
Dubai Design Week 2025 reaffirms that design is a living infrastructure — not a static discipline, but a dynamic framework for memory, identity and community. It is through this lens that Dubai continues to define its role as a global hub of creativity and cultural dialogue.
Fragment: “From 4 to 9 November 2025, Dubai will host the 11th edition of Dubai Design Week at Dubai Design District (d3).”
Footnote: Dubai Design Week is the region’s largest creative festival, drawing 100k+ visitors annually. Dubai Design Week
● Dubai Design District (d3)
Dubai Design District, or d3, is a purpose-built hub for creative industries, hosting studios, galleries, and festivals, and serving as the core venue for Dubai Design Week.
● Dubai Design Week installations
More than 30 large-scale installations transform the city into an open-air gallery each November, highlighting experimental architecture and temporary public design.
● Editions fair at d3
Editions is the Middle East’s first fair dedicated to collectible design, showcasing limited-edition works across furniture, ceramics, prints, and photography in curated settings.
● Downtown Design fair
Founded in 2013, Downtown Design is the region’s leading trade fair for contemporary interiors, where brands present cutting-edge furniture, lighting, and architecture solutions.
● Abwab pavilions
Since 2015, Abwab has commissioned designers to create experimental pavilions that encode memory, identity, and ornament as cultural storytelling through architectural form.
● Urban Commissions: The Courtyard
The 2025 edition reimagines the courtyard as a shared urban space, balancing privacy and community, with modular architecture addressing Dubai’s evolving public life.
● Cultural installations in Dubai public space
Dubai Design Week expands into the city itself, placing architectural gestures and civic design experiments in public spaces, making design part of everyday experience.
