Inside “Maker-Space”, Cairo Design Week in Metamorphosis

Set within Showland Merryland in Heliopolis, “Maker-Space: Forms in Motion” reimagines a familiar public garden as a laboratory for design. The exhibition focuses on design as an ongoing process rather than a fixed outcome, tracing how ideas move from tentative experiments to fully fledged projects.

Merryland Garden has long been regarded as an urban lung and social anchor for the neighbourhood. Here, an existing restaurant structure – all wood and neutral tones – becomes the starting point for the spatial narrative. It stands in for the “past,” a state of dormancy from which new work begins to emerge. Against this backdrop, a series of crimson interventions – wooden frames, textiles, and light, modular structures – are introduced as signs of new life. The red palette operates as a visual metaphor for metamorphosis: a shedding of old skin to reveal new forms, where traces of what came before remain embedded in what follows.

“Forms in motion” is articulated through both content and scenography. Maker-Space brings together student projects from graphic design, digital media, fashion, product design, and interior architecture, alongside work from emerging startups. The result is a cross-section of the next generation’s concerns, methods, and materials, shown not as finished endpoints but as points along a continuum of research and making. Light, flexible displays and workshop zones underscore that sense of ongoing process, allowing the space to shift between exhibition, classroom, and forum.

The initiative began with a university call-out framing Maker-Space as “a living lab of the future, powered by collaboration and purpose,” inviting student projects, prototypes, and research under one roof. Throughout Cairo Design Week, the garden hosts displays, hands-on workshops, and talks that foreground design as a collaborative act – something negotiated between disciplines, institutions, and public audiences.

By drawing together universities, independent makers, and young enterprises in a site already associated with leisure and collective living, Maker-Space positions design as both reflective and forward-looking. It acknowledges the continuity between past and future while giving tangible form to a design culture in motion.

The exhibition is an initiative by Studio 34 in partnership with Cairo Design Week, and is curated by Base Studio Cairo.