On November 7, inside Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani handed out QR800,000 — about $220,000 — to four designers most of the world had never heard of. The occasion was the second Design Doha Prize, the closing event of opening week for the Design Doha Biennial, and the winning objects say more about where design is heading than any trend report could: a power meter that tells you whether your lights are running on solar, generator or a failing grid; a lattice screen rebuilt from reclaimed teak; furniture cast from fossil-filled stone; and a lamp made out of rice waste.
Four winners, selected from more than 550
The Design Doha Prize is built around four categories — Craft, Product Design, Furniture Design and Emerging Talent — and this year drew over 550 applications from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and their diasporas, according to organizer Qatar Museums. Each winning design shares in the QR800,000 financial award, plus a two-week mentorship at Vitra’s campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany; a year of free studio space at Liwan Design Studios and Labs in Doha; retail placement through Liberty London’s outpost at Liberty Home Msheireb; and business and logistics mentorship from DHL. It is, in other words, a prize built to actually launch a product line, not just frame a certificate.
Mesh!, the Craft winner
The Craft prize went to Mesh!, a collaboration between Bahraini designers Batool Alshaikh and Maitham AlMubarak and Danish designer Christian Vennerstrøm. The piece takes reclaimed Cape teak — timber salvaged from old dhows and colonial-era buildings around the Gulf — and reworks it into interlocking wooden modules that nod to traditional Bahraini woodworking and weaving techniques. Depending on how it’s assembled, the same module system becomes a room divider, a freestanding screen, or a piece of architecture in its own right. It’s a direct answer to a real material problem in the Gulf: a region with almost no domestic timber industry, where woodworking crafts historically depended on imported wood from East Africa and India, now has a documented reuse pipeline running through its own old buildings.
PSI-01, the Product Design winner
Lebanese designer Dia Mrad, working under his Post Design Studio, won Product Design for PSI-01 — “Power Supply Indicator 01.” The device wires into a household’s electrical board and uses a simple traffic-light system to show, in real time, where the power in the building is actually coming from: green for solar, yellow for a private generator, red for the public grid, and a separate red “OFF” panel that lights during a city-wide blackout. It’s a deceptively small object answering a very specific Lebanese reality — years of grid failures have pushed households onto a patchwork of solar panels and diesel generators, often switching between sources multiple times a day without any way to track which one is actually running, or at what cost.
Low Tide and The Spoils
The Furniture Design prize went to Low Tide, a collection of tables, stools, mirrors and tableware by Lebanese designer Shaha Raphael, built from fossil-filled stone and bent metal meant to evoke the Mediterranean coastline and Lebanon’s artisan metalworking tradition. Emerging Talent went to Iranian designer Yasamin Shaikhi for The Spoils: Lights From Waste, a sculptural lighting series pressed from cooked rice waste and date pits into translucent, glowing surfaces — a material experiment aimed squarely at Qatar’s food-waste problem, in a country that still imports the vast majority of what it eats.
The biennial around the prize
The prize ceremony closed the opening week of Design Doha’s second biennial, which runs November 5, 2026 through January 31, 2027 across Fereej Al Asmakh, a heritage district of courtyards and narrow sikkas in old Doha. The headline exhibition, Arab Design Now, is curated by Noura Al Sayeh and brings together 81 designers and artisans with 78 new commissions, organized around the relationship between traditional craft skill and contemporary design across the MENASA region. Alongside it, five Public Design Commissions — curated by Javier Peña Ibáñez and backed by Qatar’s Public Works Authority, Ashghal — have installed site-specific, climate-responsive works addressing shade, cooling and water directly into the neighborhood’s public spaces, the product of an open call that drew more than 320 applications from 45 nationalities. Glenn Adamson, the biennial’s artistic director, and Fahad Al Obaidly, its director, have both framed the event as a deliberate bet that regional craft knowledge — not imported Western design language — is the more interesting raw material right now.
Why it’s worth watching
Design prizes are usually judged on polish. This one rewarded objects built to solve a problem the designer actually lives with — a blackout, a food-waste crisis, a vanishing timber supply — which is a different, harder test than “does it look good in a gallery.” Sheikha Al Mayassa, addressing the room, put it plainly: “Design Doha is an investment: connecting talent with industry, designers with architects and developers.” Four designers just got the studio space, the mentorship and the retail shelf to find out if that’s true.
