Amman Design Week Returns After 7 Years: 220 Designers, 204 Events, and a City That Doesn’t Forget

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Seven years is a long time to leave a conversation hanging. Amman Design Week last took place in 2019, when we covered an edition called “Possibilities” that was full of material experiments and optimistic making. 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. This October, the event returns to a city carrying all those years inside it. Picking up where things left off would be impossible. Starting with what has actually changed feels much more interesting.

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. Running from October 2 to 17 across five districts in and around Amman, plus the Red Sea city of Aqaba for the first time, the fourth edition of ADW brings together over 220 designers across 59 participating spaces and 204 events. Founded in 2016 by Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah, the biennial event has always had serious civic ambitions, and our coverage across three editions has tracked how those ambitions grew. The last edition was already helping rehabilitate communities and expanding access to creative tools across Jordan. This one arrives carrying the weight of everything that filled the years since.

See the full program, plan your route, and keep up with updates at ammandesignweek.com

How an Abbasid Poet About Sin Ended Up Anchoring a Design Week Theme

The 2026 curatorial team opens with a verse from the Abbasid poet Ibn al-Mu’tazz: “Do not dismiss the small; mountains are made of pebbles.” The immense form emerges through countless, often seemingly imperceptible deposits. Read as an image of accumulation, it suggests how the world is built: how knowledge grows, traditions develop, industries take shape, and cities are made. Layer upon layer and decision upon decision. The curatorial team doesn’t shy away from the darker read, acknowledging openly that accumulations can be harmful, that problems accumulate, that waste builds up, and that what builds can also bury. The program approaches the theme through three registers: Reserves and Repositories, which considers what gathers and is held; Systems and Structures, which looks at how layers of rules, decisions, and relationships build up to shape how we live; and Practices and Processes, which turns to the tools and ways of making available to us and the knowledge accumulated within them over time. That is a more rigorous curatorial architecture than most design fairs manage, and it shows.

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 aim to foreground the history of each work, drawing from inherited tools, familial narratives, or ecological cues to reveal the often-unseen scaffolding that informs our designed environments. This curatorial gesture resists the erasure of origin and instead centers the messy and generative relationships between source and aspiration. Exhibitions Curator Faysal Tabbarah, born in Aleppo and based between Sharjah and Ottawa, brings biographical fluency to this framework, with a practice built 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 work spanning Jordan, Palestine, and internationally, exploring how space, culture, and political structures shape the production of knowledge. Together, their backgrounds are the event’s argument made visible before a single object goes on display.

Four Things Amman Gets to Keep After October 17

This year, Amman Design Week introduces four permanent urban interventions: a shade structure, a lamp post, a public garden, and a playground, all placed in public space and left as small pieces of design for the community after October 17. The lamp post alone carries enough conceptual weight to deserve its own article. Designer Mohamad Nahleh drew on the structural history of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, treating it not through its religious symbolism or association with Al Israa wal Miraj 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, making the case that everyday infrastructure can carry meaning, beauty, and history while still doing its job. Infrastructure that carries that much without announcing it is a genuinely hard design problem, and this is one of the cleaner solutions to it.

Elsewhere 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, bringing together the familiar sights that shape Amman residents’ daily experience of the city. “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, and these four projects push that commitment beyond the exhibition calendar. When the program closes on October 17, the city keeps all four.

Aqaba Gets Its First Edition, and the Schools Are Coming Too

For the first time, 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, giving students the chance to develop real projects through direct exchange and mentorship. ADW has also partnered with the Madrasati initiative to connect directly with public schools, building on the ongoing efforts of the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development to strengthen creative and practical learning, with public school groups receiving dedicated guided tours of the Hangar exhibition. Across sixteen days, the event projects 90,000 visitors, with 5,000 to 10,000 expected internationally. The Aqaba expansion, school partnerships, and student exhibition make a combined case that this edition reaches further than any previous one.

The Ithra Design Week x ADW Residency pairs designers from Jordan and Saudi Arabia, producing work that sits at a particular moment in shifting regional alignments. When we covered ADW in 2017 across two pieces, including a separate spotlight on a motion-reactive Hangar installation that stopped visitors mid-step, the event was already asking what it means to make design from a specific place. The 2019 edition took that further, helping legalize 3D printing in Jordan, where it had been banned until 2017, and supporting Syrian and Palestinian communities through design programming. The program rests on a simple premise: good design is ordinary, useful, and made close to home. After seven years and everything that the time brought, that premise sounds about right.

See the full program, plan your route, and keep up with updates at ammandesignweek.com

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Snøhetta’s Sky House Is the Clubhouse That Thinks Like a Playground

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Light does the heavy lifting at Sky House. The fourth and final clubhouse Snøhetta has completed at Hong Kong’s Pavilia Farm development earns its name not through height alone but through intention. At the development’s highest point, a double-height rope-climbing tower rises through the center of the two-story, 12,150-square-foot structure and terminates beneath a domed skylight. The dome pulls the eye — and the light — into a building that was always meant to be about movement, play, and the simple act of looking up.

Pavilia Farm is a 6.5-acre mixed-use development in Hong Kong, and Snøhetta’s strategy across the site has been to distribute what would typically be a single monolithic clubhouse into four distinct structures, each one attuned to a different mode of community life. Well House activates the body. Farm House sits atop a terrace. Tea House projects beyond the site’s edge. Sky House completes the quartet by turning movement into a shared, intergenerational experience. It is a building that makes curiosity social.

Designer: Snøhetta

The spatial logic inside is organized around two contrasting ideas: cave and sky. The lower level, wrapped in an undulating floor whose colors and textures shift the quality of incoming daylight, reads as an enclosed terrain for open-ended play. Snøhetta conceived the lower-level interiors not as a literal grotto but as an environment that does not prescribe specific uses — a quiet and thoughtful move that trusts children to determine the space’s meaning. The rope-climbing tower anchors the room without dominating it, and the open span surrounding the structure gives the whole floor a sense of interior landscape.

Upstairs, the register shifts entirely. Lounge areas, fitness zones, and outdoor exercise spaces occupy the upper level, oriented toward senior residents. The arrangement places children and older residents in proximity, allowing them to see and hear one another. Sky House treats that proximity as a design feature, not an afterthought. The vitality of one group becomes part of the daily texture for the other, and the climbing tower — visible from both levels — becomes a shared focal point rather than a dividing line.

What Snøhetta has built at Pavilia Farm is less a collection of clubhouses than a sustained argument about collective living. Sky House brings that argument to its most expressive point. The dome overhead is structural, yes, but it also functions as a kind of permission: to climb, to wander, to look up, and to do all of it together.

Each of the four buildings at Pavilia Farm speaks to a different rhythm of daily life, and yet Sky House feels like the one that ties the whole vision together. It is the loudest, the most playful, and perhaps the most generous; a building that gives people of different ages and different needs the same roof, the same light, and the same reason to show up.

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The 37-Pound Advent Calendar That’s Actually Christmas Decor

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For some people, September is early enough to start thinking about Christmas. Others need Halloween to come and go before they’ll consider unpacking the ornaments. Either way, an Advent calendar rewards a little advance planning. Westwing’s Advent Calendar 2026 is especially difficult to leave until the last minute, if only because you may need to decide where to put it. This is a holiday countdown designed to be seen, not tucked away with the gift wrap.

Designed by Westwing, the calendar measures 67 × 66 × 43 centimeters, or roughly 26.4 × 26 × 16.9 inches. It weighs about 17 kilograms, or 37.5 pounds. Those numbers tell you more about the experience than the word “XL” alone: this is a substantial box with 24 doors, one for each day leading up to Christmas. It could become part of a holiday display before anyone opens the first surprise.

Designer: Westwing

Its dark red and white color scheme gives the calendar a festive presence without relying on a busy illustration or a pile of decorative extras. The appeal lies partly in the format itself. Each door adds to the visual rhythm of the box, while opening one becomes a small daily event. Westwing describes the packaging as high-quality cardboard, so it’s best to think of the exterior as an elaborate presentation rather than assume it’s a keepsake meant to last for years.

The contents are the other draw. Westwing says the 24 doors hold selections from its own collection and brands including Aesop, Bloomingville, Audo Copenhagen, Ferm Living, and WMF. That lineup gives the calendar a broader home and lifestyle focus than an Advent calendar devoted entirely to chocolate or beauty products. The listing names brands, but it does not provide a complete door-by-door inventory, so the specific item waiting behind each door remains part of the surprise.

That balance between curation and uncertainty is worth considering before you buy. If you love discovering objects you might not have picked out yourself, the variety could be the best part. If you prefer to know exactly what you’re paying for, an undisclosed assortment may be less appealing. It’s also safer not to assume that every named brand contributes a particular type of product. A familiar name can spark interest, but it doesn’t tell you what you’ll unwrap.

The calendar’s size shapes how you would live with it, too. At nearly 26 inches tall and wide, it deserves a deliberate spot rather than whatever space is left on a crowded shelf. A sturdy console, sideboard, or low table could give it room to stand out and keep its doors accessible. You probably won’t need to redesign your living room around it, but checking the measurements first could spare you an awkward shuffle of lamps, books, and other decorations.

As a gift, its strongest feature is the way it stretches one purchase into a month of small moments. Instead of handing someone a single object to open and set aside, you’re giving them a reason to pause each day. It could suit a person who enjoys interiors, likes trying new brands, or simply wants a holiday ritual that feels more grown-up than the calendars they remember from childhood. You could also buy it for yourself, with no need to pretend you bought it for someone else.

There are practical limits to the surprise. Westwing says it cannot accept partial returns: only the entire, unopened calendar can be returned. That matters if you’re tempted to open a few doors before deciding whether the purchase was worthwhile. The product is listed on Westwing’s UK site, so shoppers ordering from elsewhere should also check availability and delivery options rather than assume it will ship to their address.

Westwing’s Advent Calendar 2026 solves a familiar gift-giving problem: how to make the lead-up to Christmas feel special without choosing 24 separate presents yourself. Its oversized proportions and restrained holiday colors make the box part of the occasion, while the unknown contents keep the daily reveal intact. Just measure your space, consider whether the recipient enjoys surprises, and make sure you’re comfortable committing before that first door opens.

The post The 37-Pound Advent Calendar That’s Actually Christmas Decor first appeared on Yanko Design.

Porsche’s Car Studio Concept Secretly Doubles as a Club

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A collector car can be the most exciting thing you own and the least exciting thing you store. Keeping a prized vehicle safe often means leaving it somewhere you have no reason to linger. Porsche Design Concours starts with a better idea: a car deserves a home that feels worth visiting, even when you have no plans to drive. It treats storage as a design problem, not just a question of available space.

Porsche Design and developer Newgard Development Group have introduced Concours as a collection of privately owned automobile studios paired with a membership-based clubhouse. The first locations are planned for West Palm Beach, Florida, and Dallas, Texas, with openings expected in 2028. It is not a new Porsche to take home. It is an attempt to make the time between drives feel like part of owning a car you love.

Designer: Porsche Design

Each of those first two destinations is planned to have 22 studios, for 44 in total. That number helps explain the appeal: this is a relatively small collection of spaces, not an enormous parking structure dressed up with a familiar badge. The studios are privately owned, while the clubhouse offers a shared place to gather. I like the distinction. A collector gets room for a personal relationship with a car, without having to enjoy it entirely alone.

That feels true to the way people actually talk about cars. The conversation is rarely limited to horsepower or resale value. It moves from the one you wanted as a kid to the road trip you still remember, then to whatever another owner has parked nearby. Ordinary storage accommodates the vehicle while ignoring most of that experience. Concours seems designed to give those conversations somewhere to happen, which is a more interesting ambition than building a prettier garage.

The clubhouse is central to that idea. Plans include dining, wellness amenities, event spaces and outdoor terraces, alongside places for owners and guests to spend time together. None of those features makes a car run better, of course. But they could change the reason someone stops by. Instead of making a quick trip to check on a vehicle, you might stay for lunch, meet another enthusiast or simply enjoy being around the cars.

Despite the name on the building, Porsche ownership is not required for an invitation. That is a smart choice. A room full of immaculate examples from one brand might be impressive, but a wider mix of cars could make the place more fun to explore. The best conversations at a car gathering often begin with a surprise, whether it is an unfamiliar model or a familiar one with an unexpected story.

There is also a real architectural challenge here. Porsche Design worked closely on both initial locations, with Gensler executing the Dallas project and Urban Robot Associates handling West Palm Beach. Getting these spaces right will take more than giving every surface a polished finish. Cars need room to be seen, but people need a reason to feel comfortable staying. The strongest version of Concours would make both feel equally welcome.

I can see why this concept extends beyond conventional storage, even if its usefulness will vary by owner. Someone who wants a secure place to leave a car may have simpler options. Someone who enjoys the rituals around ownership, from looking over a vehicle on a quiet morning to sharing it with friends, may find the social space just as valuable as the studio. That difference is the point, and it is worth being clear about.

For now, Concours is a plan rather than a place you can walk into. The renderings and proposed amenities make an appealing case, but the everyday experience will matter more: how welcoming the clubhouse feels, how the studios function and whether owners genuinely want to spend time there. Exclusivity can create a sense of occasion. It cannot, by itself, create a community. The first openings in 2028 will put that promise to the test.

Still, I appreciate the question Porsche Design is asking. A car collection is usually presented as a row of beautiful objects behind closed doors. Concours imagines those doors opening onto a place where people can enjoy the cars and each other’s company. If it succeeds, the payoff will be more than better storage. It will be a good reason to visit a car on a day when the keys never leave your pocket.

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The first LEGO Dragon Ball set is here, and Shenron costs $180

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LEGO has been making anime for about fifteen years now, it just never bothered to license any. Ninjago is a spiky-haired ensemble of teenage martial artists who power up through color-coded elemental forms and shout while they do it. Monkie Kid pulls straight from Journey to the West. Both shows are anime in everything except paperwork, built by a Danish company that clearly spent a lot of time watching after-school TV and taking notes. So there’s something very funny about LEGO finally going to an actual Japanese animation studio in 2026 and asking, politely, if it could borrow the real thing.

Toei said yes. The result is the LEGO Icons Dragon Ball: Shenron & Goku (11390), a 1,764-piece display model of the wish-granting dragon coiling up out of all seven Dragon Balls, with Kid Goku parked on his Kintoun off to one side. It’s the first LEGO and Toei Animation collaboration ever, the first Dragon Ball set LEGO has ever produced, and the first time Goku has existed as a minifigure. For a debut, going straight for the dragon is a confident move. Shenron is the hardest thing in the franchise to build out of rectangles.

Designers: Jae Won Lee & LEGO

Bar-and-clip hinges hold Shenron’s body together internally while plate hinges do the work on the outside, and that combination is the entire reason this thing reads as a curve instead of a staircase. Jae Won Lee built the dragon in repeating segments, each angled a few degrees off the last, so the deviation accumulates into a loop rather than a series of visible steps. Brickset’s review called the process repetitive in stretches, which is true and also the price of admission. Anything smoother would need custom molded parts, and then it stops being LEGO. The finished body flows upward through 32 centimeters of height without a single moment where you can see the seams doing their job.

A grey rock pillar runs up the center of the model, and Shenron is permanently attached to it. Brickset confirmed the dragon cannot be built or displayed independently, which is the honest engineering tell here: 1,764 pieces of green plastic arranged into a loop have to hang off something, and physics does not negotiate. I respect that LEGO left the pillar visible rather than disguising it as scenery. Articulation is modest as a result, with a few degrees of head rotation, an opening jaw, and legs that pivot at several joints. This is a statue that lets you nudge it, and the marketing sensibly sells it that way.

Goku arrives here as a minifigure for the first time in either company’s history, wearing the orange gi with Master Roshi’s Kame kanji printed on the chest. He carries the Power Pole, wears a printed Saiyan tail, and sits on the Kintoun, which matters more than it looks. At this point in the original series Goku cannot fly on his own ki yet, so the cloud is his actual transportation rather than a prop. Riding it also requires being pure of heart, a detail that becomes very funny once you learn he is an alien from a warrior race. The new spiky wig element is the best part of the figure.

Seven Dragon Balls sit at the base on trans-clear studs, each individually printed with its correct star count, one through seven. Lightning bursts in translucent yellow where the dragon breaks through, and the front nameplate carries the original manga logo rather than anything from the Z era. LEGO also colored many of the internal structural pieces orange to match the Dragon Balls, including parts buried inside the base where nobody will ever see them. The instruction booklet highlights new pieces in orange instead of the usual red. Those two decisions cost money and win nothing measurable, which is exactly how you tell a licensing exercise apart from a set somebody cared about.

One minifigure for $179.99 is where this set loses me. Bulma invented the Dragon Radar and drove the entire original search, and her absence from a set celebrating that specific storyline is a genuine gap that Brick Fanatics and Stonewars both flagged. Brickset’s per-piece math lands at 10.2 cents in the US against fairer numbers in the UK and Eurozone, part of a wider 2026 exchange-rate drift on LEGO pricing. Bandai’s S.H.Figuarts Shenron sits around $130 fully painted and articulated. LEGO is charging a premium for the privilege of assembling yours.

Insiders get early access on November 1, with general release on November 4 through LEGO Stores and LEGO.com, and more Dragon Ball sets are already confirmed for 2027 and beyond. Put this beside the 681-piece Pokémon Rayquaza and the comparison stops being polite, which tells you something about how seriously LEGO treated its first swing here. Fifteen years of building its own anime gave the company an unusually good understanding of what this material needs. Toriyama died in March 2024 without seeing his dragon in brick form. The set that finally arrived is worthy of him, and I hope Bulma is in the next one.

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Campanero builds tent trailer that grows from 2-person to 6-person family camper with swappable design

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Camper trailers have a lifespan that is not dependent on their construction, but on the requirements of your growing family. When you’re a couple, the trailer’s smaller, and as the kids join, the requirements grow, and everything from the tow vehicle to the loss of money in trade-offs adds up to the cost. This is why Campanero, known for its lightweight, modular tent trailers and folding campers, has unveiled a new modular tent trailer that’s one base for three models. It grows with the growing needs of your family or friends.

So, the three new models released by Campanero build on the same modular trailer platform. You are just required to unzip the tent from the trailer and swap it with the model that best suits the phase of your life you’re in. “That way, one trailer becomes a Pah-Pah, an Eck-Oh, or a Char-Lee,” Campanero explains. When your life changes, your Campanero changes with it, but without the cost of a trailer every time.

Designer: Campanero

To understand what each of the three tent trailer models has to offer, let’s start with the base model called the Pah-Pah. This Campanero trailer packs a living space comfortable enough for solo or two-person escapes that one can tow behind their EV or a small vehicle. Compact yet feature-rich and cozy to live in like a furnished bedroom, the Campanero Pah-Pah has no hard folding panels, no massive tent expansion; it takes up a small space atop the trailer and is designed to let you live there comfortably.

It is made from high-quality Tencate KA-10 poly-cotton fabric supported by a stainless-steel frame on a German chassis prepared for speeds up to 62 mph (100 km/h). Riding akin to a roof tent on a trailer, Pah-Pah’s interior feels more comfortable to camp in than an average rooftop tent (RTT), propelling it into the camper spectrum. When ready to ride away, the tent folds away into the cargo box below. The tent trailer weighs 705 lbs. and is limited to two people. If you make the compromise, you may fit a couple and a small child at max. No matter how many people you have onboard, the tent trailer comes with just one 63 x 79-inch mattress that is roughly 7 inches thick and a total sheltered space of 40 sq. ft.

As mentioned above, Campanero has developed the Pah-Pah base model to function as the foundation of a modular camping system, which grows with your family’s needs. The second model in the list is called the Eck-Oh. Designed for four people, the trailer-top tent increases the sheltered living space from 40 sq. ft. to 91.5 sq. ft., so you can accommodate additional sleepers in there. If you want it as a secluded family retreat, you can choose to utilize the additional space created by the 102 sq. ft. awning for a covered dining area or bathroom.

Eck-Oh, which also bumps up the price from base Pah-Pah’s €13,950 (approx. $15,800) to €16,950 (approx. $19,200), weighs 815 lbs. and ensures up to four people can camp in it easily. If even the four-person tent trailer doesn’t cut the bill for you, Campanero is working on a six-person modular tent trailer model it calls the Char-Lee. This model will increase the sheltered living space to 99 sq ft. inside. It will include a larger 124 sq. ft. awning but will start at a slightly higher €18,950 (approx. $21,500).

 

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