Inside Amman Design Week 2026: A Director Previews What's Ahead

Amman Design Week (ADW) is back for its 4th edition after a seven-year hiatus. “But Amman, the designers and the makers themselves never really paused,” co-director Bisher Tabbaa tells scenehome, “which is why we decided to come up with the theme: ‘Accumulations’.”

Indeed, talent has been brewing in Jordan since 2019, and much of that culmination will be on display from October 2nd to 17th through exhibitions and programs, including workshops, talks, and performances across their five main districts - from Ammani neighbourhoods like Jabal Al Lweibdeh, Jabal Amman, and Ras El Ain, to the rolling hills of Iraq Al Amir, and the Red Sea coastline of Aqaba. on your daily commute, perhaps on their billboards, bridges, buses, or a poster on the door of one of the local establishments that will soon be opening up to host galleries and talks.

Founded by Queen Rania Abdullah in 2016, ADW was among the first weeks of its kind in the region. Dubai Design Week was the first, beginning in 2015, a prequel to the ‘design week’ concept that has since found a unique language in cities like Cairo, Beirut, Doha and this year Ramallah.

“We’re in a design renaissance,” Tabbaa said about the buzz around design in the Arab world, solidified through international design events like the one in Amman. While the majority are Jordanian, the 120 designers at ADW are coming from 14 countries in total, including Algeria, Bahrain, Denmark, Egypt, India, Iraq, Italy, KSA, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Qatar, and Syria.

“Design weeks are about making design accessible, empowering our culture, and pushing people to innovate,” Tabbaa continued. This was his goal in reviving ADW after exhibiting in the last edition in 2019. The other co-director Sarah Hejazin was part of that same edition’s team, and together, the two of them founded the NYC and Amman-based design studio FADAA which won the 2024 Design Doha Prize. Tabbaa and Hejazin were appointed last year to rebuild and reinstate ADW, so the event can continue more sustainably. Now, the plan is for ADW to occur every two years.

“We share very similar values to Amman Design Week, which is that design has the power to, or actually, it needs to create a relationship between culture, the environment, and society,” Tabbaa said. “Amman Design Week is very unique to other design institutions given its grassroots nature.”

In addition to the five exhibition districts, 59 participating spaces, including shops, museums, studios and other local spaces are supporting ADW - hosting workshops and talks throughout the two weeks.

Tabbaa highlighted the exhibitions at the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Jabal Al Lweibdeh, namely ‘When Places Awaken in Creativity’, an exhibition that documents the museum’s journey of transforming historic buildings into spaces dedicated to art. This location will additionally include the exhibition ‘What Remains; The Life of Place’ facilitated by Maisam Architects and the ‘Art and Environment Symposium - Reimagining Reality.’

Tabbaa also mentioned 7-Dal’s workshop as a highlight, an up-and-coming cultural space supporting Arab film and independent narratives from Jordan, the Arab world, and the Global Majority. It is titled ‘From Page to Projection: Arabic Print Archives and the Culture of Cinemagoing.”

Design will also extend to the culinary, at NOFA Creative Space off Amman’s Rainbow Street. Their workshop ‘The Sound of a Seed’ on October 10th brings farmers, chefs, and consumers to the same table to explore food systems.

ADW asked graphic designers to design an original stamp related to Amman for each of the 55 participating spaces. “If visitors collect 10 stamps,” Tabbaa said, “they win a prize.”

The event itself not only engages Jordanian makers, designers, and audiences across the capital and beyond, but what it creates also gives back to those communities. Across each edition, the goal of ADW is to empower designers to improve lives, their website states.

This is clear in one of the main exhibitions, ‘Hangar Ras El Ain’, curated by Faysal Tabbarah. The huge warehouse holds the work of over 90 designers, like Groundwork, a group of three young designers who want to create accessible public space.

“The response to that was designing a modular playground toolkit - a one by two meter box on wheels that you can drag to any park,” Tabbaa explained. “It’s very affordable: you just bring it to the park, open it up, and you have a swing set, a slide, a basketball court, a ping pong table, a seesaw, and a few other things you'd find in a playground. It’s a direct response to creating an affordable playground kit that the municipality can deploy all around Amman, or around Jordan.”

ADW also makes room for those just starting out. Alongside Jordanian and international designers, 40 high school and university students are showcasing 34 projects they developed through a 9-month mentorship program. To make participation more equitable, they partnered this year with the NGO Madrasati, which works with underserved public schools in the country, bringing eight kids from those schools into the program.

“It's important to recognise the fact that a lot of the people who are shaping the industry nowadays are people who participated in design weeks early on in their career,” Tabbaa said. "This investment in the next generation of designers fortifies the entire ecosystem."

“Design is everywhere, whether we notice it or not,” he continued. “So good design shapes our daily lives - whether that's economically empowering the makers behind Amman Design Week, or becoming part of someone's daily routine, like a park they now use.”

Stay tuned with SceneHome for more coverage of ADW, live in Jordan.