The Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (DIDI), has partnered with international furniture brand, Vitra for Dubai Design Week, setting its students and faculty the task of designing a chair for the future.

The collaboration, titled Kursi, tasks DIDI students and faculty with taking inspiration from the lengthy design process that was involved in creating Vitra’s Panton chair, and marks the 50^th anniversary of the iconic design.

The challenge asks designers to explore alternative approaches to chair design and will culminate in an exhibition at this year’s Dubai Design Week. Kursi will showcase the DIDI student works, as well as Vitra’s limited edition Panton chairs CHROME & GLOW, developed especially to mark the 50^th anniversary.

The six-week design challenge and resulting Dubai Design Week showcase will be the DIDI students’ first live project and will showcase what the future of chair design could look like for Generation Z, the networked generation. DIDI will be running dedicated workshops over the duration of the challenge and has already seen students and faculty working on diverse concepts, which include chairs made from repurposed and recycled material, 3D printed designs, minimalist interpretations created from wood and designs produced from plastics and concrete.

Hani Asfour, Associate Dean of DIDI, comments: “At DIDI we provide our students with design skills that take inspiration from the past but are firmly focused on the future. This includes considering key design drivers, such as sustainability, user experience and innovation. Kursi is an exciting opportunity for DIDI to showcase this thinking. What better way to do this than on the region’s biggest design stage, Dubai Design Week!

A Vitra spokesperson comments: “As the first design school in the region to be offering a cross concentration design degree, we are excited to be working with DIDI for this year’s Dubai Design Week. Be it Verner Panton in the early 1960s or today’s design students, the challenges, learnings and innovation required to bring a product to market require patience, dedication and learnings. Celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year, the iconic Panton chair is an inspirational design story for generations past and future and we hope to inspire DIDI students with the Kursi design challenge. ”

The Kursi exhibition will be located in Dubai Design District, Building 4, Ground Floor throughout Dubai Design Week, 12^th – 17^th November.

The first of its kind in the region, DIDI offers a unique design education, in the form of a four-year Bachelor of Design Degree (BDes), the curriculum of which has been crafted in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Parsons School of Design. According to the 2016 MENA Design Education Outlook report, the MENA region will require 30,000 new design graduates by 2019 and DIDI aims to harness design talent in the Middle East, to fuel the growth of the industry. DIDI officially opened its doors to its first cohort of students in September 2018.