This November, SHAPE & SHADE™ proudly took part in Dubai Design Week 2024, marking another important step in our journey of bringing Kosovo’s design stories to the international stage. At the heart of the festival, we presented our BOLD SHKAM chair — our first product, and a piece that embodies the dialogue between heritage and innovation.
Bold Shkam in Dubai
Inspired by the Albanian Shkam stool, the BOLD SHKAM has been reimagined as a modular and customizable chair, designed to adapt to different spaces while preserving cultural memory. In Dubai, surrounded by an audience from across the Middle East and beyond, the chair became a conversation piece — inviting interaction, sparking curiosity, and celebrating identity in a playful, versatile form.
Exhibited within [insert exact platform here — e.g., Downtown Design or Isola Dubai], the BOLD SHKAM stood alongside contemporary works from leading designers worldwide, affirming our belief that local traditions can inspire global design narratives.
Beyond the Showcase
Our participation at Dubai Design Week extended beyond exhibiting. We delivered our talk, Past Forward: A Dialogue Between Heritage and Innovation, where we explored how memory, craft, and context shape our practice. We also hosted a workshop on identity through design, creating a space where participants reflected on their own cultural stories through objects and form.
The festival provided us with the opportunity to connect with regional and international designers, explore Dubai’s fast-growing creative landscape, and exchange ideas on how design can shape the future of our cities and communities.
A New Chapter in the Middle East
Dubai Design Week was our first step into the Middle East, a region full of energy, diversity, and cultural intersections. For SHAPE & SHADE™, this was not just about showing a product — it was about building bridges, opening dialogues, and discovering shared values through design.
Reflection: What We Take Home from Dubai
Dubai gave us a glimpse of the global design community’s openness to stories like ours. The response to the BOLD SHKAM — both as a piece of design and as a cultural narrative — showed us that people everywhere resonate with authenticity. What we bring home from this experience is the confidence that our ideas, rooted in Kosovo and the Balkans, have a place in shaping international conversations. We return inspired to continue pushing forward, to share more stories, and to create more spaces where heritage and innovation meet.
