Supported by Dubai Culture & Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) and Dubai Design District (d3), Urban Commissions is a Dubai Design Week initiative that presents an annual opportunity for designers living in the UAE to produce an urban furniture product, unveiled at Dubai Design Week and installed permanently at d3.

Submissions for Urban Commissions 5 are now closed.

Theme: Telling Time

In 2019, Urban Commissions celebrates its fifth anniversary with the theme ‘Telling Time’. Seeking unique and innovative designs that display the time, the design competition pays homage to the Deira Clocktower, one of the first monuments of the city of Dubai.

The public installation can; investigate ancient methods such as sun-dials and hourglasses, experiment with solar-powering analogue or digital clocks, offer innovative solutions for using light, composite materials, kinetics or new technologies. The competition seeks unique design discovering new means to display the current time.

Urban Commissions is a design competition launched by Dubai Design Week, Dubai Culture & Arts Authority and Dubai Design District (d3) in 2014 to celebrate the UAE’s growing design-conscious urban development and engage with the local design community and product industries by offering a grant of AED50,000 to the winning design submission to be manufactured fully in the UAE.

The competition has received over 400 submissions by designers from more than 30 nationalities residing in the UAE. The inaugural winning commission was the IDO bench designed by Anna Szonyi; winner of UC2 was Hinjal Kumar for her design of hybrid shelter x bicycle storage ‘bike d3’; UC3 winner was SuperFutureDesign* for their communal table MuTable and UC4 winner was Khalid Al Tamimi for the water feature ‘Fayyd’. All Urban Commissions have been installed in d3.