During Dubai Design Week and as part of Global Grad Show, students from Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation teamed up with students showcasing their inventions at the exhibition to take part in the Dubai Evolution Challenge.

Taking place for the first time this year and overseen by Tuuli Maria Utrainen from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the challenge sent three teams out into the city to identify and create a future evolution of everyday objects, activities or services that they discover in Dubai.

The teams worked across three days and then presented their ideas to their fellow Global Grad Show exhibitors and to the public, who then selected the winning project Murshid’. Azzan Abdel Farooq from Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation said of his team’s idea and the overall experience, “I really enjoyed the fact that I got to meet people from all over the world and got to experience different perspectives and mindsets when it came to problem solving, design and innovation and how we approached issues in different ways; that was a key aspect of the challenge. We went to the old city and looked at different objects and whether they could be evolved or adapted and if they were outdated. Our project ‘Murshid’ is an AR/VR project in which you have a booth of sorts where you can download a localised map of a historical site and be able to see the place you are in the way that is was 40 or 50 years ago, enabled by an evolved wearable technology.”

Of his experience of the Dubai Evolution Challenge, Peter Cheah from Monash University in Australia said, “I really liked the Dubai Evolution Challenge because we actually got out and explored Dubai. We got into the old centre which has got this very different feel to the new polished Dubai. We visited the gold souk, the spice market and the old souk and what I loved about it is the exploration part which is how we came up with the idea of Nathra’ which means glimpse for our project. It’s a map that gets made as you explore the city and prompts people to go places they haven’t been before and when they leave, it creates a really nice personalised souvenir they can take with them.”

Find out more about Global Grad Show here.