Exposition du Prix du design de l'IMA 2026

Come and discover the Arab world’s design creations at the Arab World Institute: a selection of works by the finalists of the Arab World Institute Design Prize 2026.

Bringing together a jury, this prize aims to highlight emerging and established designers from the region, showcasing their know-how, productive ingenuity, and the creation of new materials. It offers a contemporary reading of the Arab world’s art of living through the lens of design.

The exhibition brings together the finalists of this fourth edition, selected in five categories:

- Emerging Talent Prize (for a student or designer whose professional practice has less than 10 years): this prize pays particular attention to solutions addressing issues specific to Arab countries, manufacturing processes, and development potential.
- Contemporary Craftsmanship Prize: future-oriented, this prize, created under the impulse of Nada Debs, honors craft that revisits traditions (including through the use of technological innovations) to address contemporary challenges such as sustainability, personalization, and the valorization of local heritage.
- Impact Prize: this prize recognizes social impact (education and transmission, safeguarding territories, protection of populations), environmental impact (ecological solution, local production, valorization of low-carbon materials), and economic impact (development of operating processes, technologies, modernization of traditions, job creation).
- Grand Prize (architect or designer whose professional practice exceeds 10 years): this prize honors a concrete achievement, an object or an interior architecture project, revealing the work developed by its creator over a career.
- Public Prize, awarded to one of the finalists at the end of an online voting campaign.

AlUla Exhibition, Design of a Living Territory, from 10 to 20 September 2026 at the Arab World Institute.

From urban furniture to shading devices, from prototypes to objects born of research-based approaches, the works presented here pose essential questions: how to build in a desert environment without neglecting its fundamental characteristics? How can design produce comfort and beauty while respecting the fragility of ecosystems? How can it belong distinctly to this landscape, and to none other? The ambition of AlUla’s design programs is to affirm the territory as a living laboratory, where creativity accompanies development in dialogue with the place, its inhabitants and their histories spanning millennia.