Final Draft

This interesting-looking event by the Ripple Collective, a group of multidisciplinary designers and design-led retailers based in Abu Dhabi, has been running for four years now with little fanfare. It offers a day of “the things we love most: good people, good design, good ideas and the potential impact of putting them all together”. So it’s not your usual design festival, either in scale or content; but it does look like a good chance to meet and share. It’s free (preregister here) and it will be a small group – which should be for the better, providing opportunities to interact and engage.

There are a couple of concurrent sessions to chose from; note that some sessions have limited spaces and so need preregistration – we’ve indicated those. The schedule:

12.00 – 12.50pm Slash Sessions: The Impossible Spaghetti
A “fun and informative workshop” that “will work towards the impossible”: defining something that is simultaneously true and untrue … Slash, incidentally, is the strategic design studio at the heart of the Ripple Collective. RSVP here 

1.00 – 1.50pm Base Session: Adventures in AI
Ripple folk talk about their design approach to AI and what happens when it goes wrong. A live build session will put it to the test.

1.00 – 1.50pm Fount Workshop: Doll Lab
A “messy but manageable creative session” inspired by Alexander Girard’s Vitra dolls, scrap wood and colour to excite your inner child (and your actual child too if you want). Fount is a “curated concept store” that’s part of Ripple … RSVP here 

1.00 – 2.50pm Sadu Workshop: Craft in Action
An introductory to traditional Emirati/Bedouin Sadu hand-weaving. RSVP here 

2.00 – 2.50pm Talk: Shaikha Al Ketbi – Common Grounds
Visual artist Al Ketbi unpacks her four years in Japan – how it inspired her art, her work on the UAE Pavilion at the Osaka Expo, what cross-cultural creativity means in practice

3.00 – 3.50pm UncleNado’s Listening Lounge
A session for your ears and your eyes: the connection between good music and good album cover design

3.00 – 3.50pm Slash Sessions: Spill the Chai
Brewing karak has more to say about who we are than you’d think. This workshop is a space to listen, to brew, and to leave with something that stays longer than the taste … RSVP here 

4.00 – 4.50pm Talk: Mohamed Dardiri – The Design/Making Battle
Bringing design to life – the link between designing something and then actually making it

4.00 – 4.50pm Fabrica Workshop: Block Printing with Muge
Make prints, print prints, admire your prints (Fabrica is the industrial design and craftsmanship studio in the Ripple orbit). RSVP here 

5.00 – 5.50pm Talk: Music meets Design with Pho & Teenage Engineering
Behind the sound and design of Teenage Engineering, “one of the world’s coolest audio brands”

5.00 – 5.50pm Fabrica Workshop: Block Printing with Muge
Another session as above. RSVP here 

6.00 – 6.30pm break

6.30 – 7.15pm Talk: Is This Emirati? with Saleh (La Petite)
A conversation on contemporary Emirati design, the culture that inspires it, the expression it takes and the magic needed to bring it to life

7.20-8.00pm Main Talk: The Long Way Home with Nuno Abreu
A talk from the main man of Slash, the design studio at the heart of Ripple, on building a contemporary design scene through scarcity, beauty, and the perspective gained from distance