Amman Design Week Returns After Seven Years With 220 Designers

Amman Design Week returns on October 2 after a seven-year hiatus, bringing together more than 220 designers across 59 participating spaces and 204 events in five districts in and around Amman — and, for the first time, the Red Sea city of Aqaba.

The fourth edition of the biennial, founded in 2016 by Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah, runs through October 17. The last edition took place in 2019, themed "Possibilities." Since then the region has lived through a pandemic, multiple regional conflicts, and population displacement at a scale that reshaped the demographic reality of an entire neighborhood of countries.

The 2026 theme is "Accumulations" — a word capacious enough to hold inherited craft, salvaged stone, family recipes, and the less welcome things that gather over time. The curatorial team anchors the program in a verse from the Abbasid poet Ibn al-Mu'tazz: "Do not dismiss the small; mountains are made of pebbles."

The curators do not avoid the darker reading. They acknowledge openly that accumulations can be harmful, that problems accumulate, that waste builds up, and that what builds can also bury.

Three Curatorial Registers

The program approaches the theme through three registers. "Reserves and Repositories" considers what gathers and is held. "Systems and Structures" looks at how layers of rules, decisions, and relationships build up to shape how we live. "Practices and Processes" turns to the tools and ways of making available to us and the knowledge accumulated within them over time.

Each project in the exhibitions is presented as a diptych in dialogue with a trace: a selected artifact, archival document, or oral history. The traces foreground the history of each work, drawing from inherited tools, familial narratives, or ecological cues to reveal the often-unseen scaffolding behind designed environments.

Exhibitions Curator Faysal Tabbarah, born in Aleppo and based between Sharjah and Ottawa, builds his practice around regional, environmental, and architectural imaginaries. Programs Curator Khaled Al-Bashir, Arts and Culture Director at Darat al Funun in Amman, trained at the Architectural Association in London and has worked across Jordan, Palestine, and internationally on how space, culture, and political structures shape the production of knowledge.

Four Permanent Interventions

This year's edition introduces four permanent urban interventions: a shade structure, a lamp post, a public garden, and a playground, all placed in public space and left to the community after October 17.

The lamp post alone carries considerable conceptual weight. Designer Mohamad Nahleh drew on the structural history of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock — treating it not through its religious symbolism but as a record of nearly thirteen centuries of repairs, reinforcements, and rebuilding under successive historical periods. The result is a half-scale sculptural fragment in wood and steel, installed as a functioning lighting pole above a small stone seat.

In Ras El Ain Park, designer Abeer Anabtawi transforms a large patch of bare concrete at the park's center into a basketball court decorated with the vegetation found on produce carts and dinner tables across Amman: tomatoes, chamomile, mallow leaves, and wheat.

"Ard al Sahn" by L.E.FT and collaborators redesigns an inaccessible street intersection outside the Shariah Mosque using local stone waste, with the floor oriented toward the Qibla. Civil Architecture's shade structure threads a ceramic-tile roof between existing tree trunks in the same park, closing the gaps in the canopy overhead, with the tiles developed and manufactured in Jordan by Haswa.

Eighty percent of the work across ADW's track record has been produced locally. When the program closes on October 17, the city keeps all four installations.

Aqaba, Schools, and Regional Residency

Amman Design Week arrives in Aqaba with exhibitions, installations, workshops, and public programs developed with WUJUD Art Foundation, responding to the city's coastal landscape, histories, and communities.

The Student Mentorship Program connects students with practitioners across typography, furniture making, architecture, UX/UI design, community-centered design, product design, digital fabrication, and jewelry design. ADW has also partnered with the Madrasati initiative to connect with public schools, building on efforts by the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development, with public school groups receiving dedicated guided tours of the Hangar exhibition.

The Ithra Design Week x ADW Residency pairs designers from Jordan and Saudi Arabia, producing work at a particular moment in shifting regional alignments.

Across sixteen days, the event projects 90,000 visitors, with 5,000 to 10,000 expected internationally. The 2019 edition helped legalize 3D printing in Jordan — where it had been banned until 2017 — and supported Syrian and Palestinian communities through design programming. This edition's Aqaba expansion, school partnerships, and student exhibition together reach further than any previous one.

The full program is available at ammandesignweek.com.