AlUla Design Award Winners In Product And Fashion Design Categories

The AlUla Design Award named its latest Product Design and Fashion Design winners during the fourth award ceremony at the AlUla Arts Festival, where regional and international designers, cultural leaders, and creative professionals gathered to recognise contemporary work rooted in materials, craftsmanship, and a close relationship with AlUla’s landscape and history.

The event took place in the AlJadidah Arts District, within the "Material Witness: Celebrating Design From Within" programme and exhibition, which examines design as an ongoing cultural practice shaped by research and experimentation, rather than as decoration alone, and emphasises how designers respond to place, environment, and community knowledge.

Product designer Abdulrahman Al Muftah from Qatar received the Product Design Award for "Bird Whistle," a collection of clay whistles that reproduce calls of native bird species in AlUla. Each whistle was individually formed by hand and acoustically adjusted, linking traditional ceramic techniques with attention to the region’s biodiversity and the sounds present in its natural surroundings.

Fashion designer Matthieu Gautier of France won the Fashion Design Award for "Monumental Miniature," a wearable piece informed by the carved sandstone tombs at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Hegra, combining digital accuracy with detailed hand finishing to explore how the human body, landscape forms, and ornamentation interact through contemporary fashion design.

The announcement of winners was integrated into the "Material Witness: Celebrating Design From Within" exhibition, which links the AlUla Design Award with the AlUla Artist Residency – Design Edition, AlUla Designathon, and Madrasat Addeera, presenting these initiatives as a coordinated network that supports a research-driven design ecosystem and sustained cultural production in the governorate.

Across the exhibition and its public sessions, participating designers worked with materials central to AlUla’s surroundings, including clay, palm, stone, metal, textiles, and pigments, treating them as living substances shaped by climate conditions, human labour, and historical time, while keeping dialogue open with global approaches to contemporary design practice.

AlUla Design Award vision, scope, and growing international interest

The AlUla Design Award forms a key element of AlUla’s wider design ecosystem, developed by Arts AlUla, and supports designers who engage directly with the region’s cultural narratives and natural geography, reinforcing long-term plans to connect heritage, tourism, and creative industries within a shared framework for future development.

Director of Arts and Creative Industries at the Royal Commission for AlUla Hamad AlHomeidan said: "The AlUla Design Award represents a strategic platform within our long-term vision to position AlUla as a global destination for culture, design, and creative exchange. It supports research- and material-led practices and strengthens the role of design in cultural sustainability, tourism development, and shaping the governorate’s future identity."

In its fourth edition, the AlUla Design Award continued its open call under the Year of Handicrafts, using the theme "The Ingenuity of the Human Hand" to highlight handmade traditions, skilled making, and material-led thinking as central to contemporary design, and the call attracted submissions from 31 nationalities, underlining AlUla’s rising profile within the international design community.

The winning projects and ten shortlisted finalists are displayed at Design Space AlUla within the "Material Witness: Celebrating Design From Within" exhibition, where visitors can examine the pieces through sight, touch, and close observation, gaining insight into handmade details and seeing how designers connect materials, craftsmanship, and AlUla’s specific environment.

With inputs from SPA