Design is important. It decides how things look and how they work; it shapes our material culture, our everyday life and our consumer world, it influences our lifestyles and fashions, and it fundamentally informs our aesthetic sense and judgements.

Written by Dennis Jarrett

The way things look and work can inspire us, confuse us, and provoke us into having an opinion. Design matters.

Now, in some ways there isn’t a long tradition of formal design in the Gulf – with a couple of notable exceptions. One is style of dress – because fashion is design too. Interestingly, there’s another element to the classic Emirati styles; the choice of black abaya and white dishdashah was promoted specifically in the early days of the UAE as a conscious contribution to a sense of nationality. That’s design.

The other and more obvious example of design in Gulf life is calligraphy, hailed as the most important of the arts because the development of Arabic script was fundamentally associated with transmission of the Qur’an. Islamic calligraphy illustrates useful advice, brings clarity to thought and enhances meaning. It is beautiful but functional too. It is design.

What we don’t have in the Gulf is a strong tradition of design in other fields. That’s because the built environment and urban constructions, and the concept of style and fashion have all been recent arrivals. If you don’t have buildings you don’t need architects – particularly if you don’t have buildings that are intended to make a statement. If you don’t have complicated interiors, you don’t need interior design. If you don’t have newspapers, magazines and advertising, there isn’t much requirement for graphic design. And so on.

That’s all changed now. The Gulf in general and Abu Dhabi in particular is widely regarded as a successful experiment in high-speed urbanisation, creating the city of the future using a heady mix of local and international ideas, knowledge and money.

Abu Dhabi is not (yet) a centre for innovative and exciting developments in design – but it does have major opportunities to become a regional hub for design. We’re seeing this particularly in big public buildings – the Aldar HQ, the Yas Hotel, the Saadiyat museums – because enterprises and government see the value of design as a commercial differentiator. The younger generation in the UAE is becoming more design-conscious, too.

The time is right to build on this potential – to show what is possible: to stimulate and propose: to explore the interface between local traditions and international ideas: to let people experience creative work in the different areas labelled ‘design’. The time is right for an Abu Dhabi Design Festival.