Highlights from Beirut Design Week

Beirut Design Week returned for its sixth edition last week, with over 150 design events, symposiums, talks and workshops taking place over eight days from the 19-26 May 2017. This year’s edition considered the theme of ‘Is design a need?’, allowing for a focus on critical design.

Organized by the MENA Design Research Center, Beirut Design Week aims to promote local and regional design, and simultaneously examines the unique challenges faced by the design community in the current social and political landscape. Held annually, Beirut Design Week facilitates networking and discussions amongst product designers, architects, graphic designers and fashion designers, as they showcase their works through curated exhibitions held throughout the city.

Keep reading for some of our top picks from the recent edition!

BEIRUT MAKERS: NIGHT BROUGHT THE NEED FOR LIGHT

Design collective Beirut Makers presented a collection of lighting products in response to Beirut Design Week’s 2017 theme, with particular focus on digital production and fabrication.

THE SILENT ROOM

A hand-made timber tower with a bright pink exterior, The Silent Room by Nathalie Harb disrupts the monotony of the urban landscape and invites viewers into the cosy interior space to provide an oasis of calm within the bustling city.

CRITICAL MASS: WOMEN IN GRAPHIC DESIGN

An exhibition held in homage to women graphic designers from the past three decades, showcasing their vital role in Lebanese contemporary visual culture. The exhibition looks at the designers through an artistic lens, instead of the often-assumed commercial nature of graphic design work.

NATIONMETRIX

In a work that could not be more timely, Roula Salamon and Ieva Saudergaite created a spatial and sensorial installation meant to reflect the experience of a Lebanese passport holder while travelling. The installation was inspired by metal-detecting portals, and with recent international security concerns creating harsher border control and travel restrictions, considers the object of a passport as a metaphorical door into certain countries and geographies.

OBJECTS OF CHANGE

Objects of Change is an outdoor installation designed by Ghassan Salameh Studio and produced collaboratively with L’artisan du Liban artisans and glass artisan atelier Céline Hage. The objects are inspired by traditional craft techniques and how the basic geometric elements found in various oriental aesthetics have evolved.

HANDLE WITH CARE

An ambitious project heralded by AKK Architects, this exhibition chronicles the planned restoration of a nineteenth-century mansion from the final decades of the Ottoman Empire through project designs, drawings, photos, models and more.

SPECULATIVE NEEDS

Presenting the concepts and prototypes that came out of a series of workshops held at the design departments of all the major universities in Lebanon, the works in this exhibition are all inspired by our future needs for physical human interaction, with technology increasingly taking this away from societies. 

The Artling is proud to be a Media Partner of Beirut Design Week 2017!