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Visiting Dubai Design Week for New Scientist, 20 December 2018<\/a><\/p>\n For a while now, I have been barracking my betters (and with a quite spectacular lack of success) to send me to cover the science and technology of the Middle East. True, it\u2019s a region abuzz with boosterism and drowning in vapourware, but big\u00a0issues do get addressed here, in a bullish, technocratic sort of way.<\/p>\n Is the planet in trouble? Certainly. The scale of the problem is easier to accept if you live in a climate and an ecosystem that was barely habitable to begin with. Is this state of affairs a consequence of human action? Obviously: the Gulf used to be green, with the whole coast once threaded with irrigation channels. No one here is ignorant of the fact. Should we\u00a0bail out for Mars<\/a>\u00a0at the earliest available opportunity? Hell, yes \u2013 and Dubai, where the air-con (if not yet the air) has to be paid for, is the closest Earth has to a civic blueprint for Mars.<\/p>\n At the Dubai Design Week last\u00a0November, I met\u00a0a new generation of graduates sharing designs for the end of the world.<\/p>\n They had come for the fourth edition of the\u00a0city\u2019s annual Global Grad Show<\/a>.\u00a0The show\u00a0featured 150 works this year, representing 100 of the world\u2019s best design schools in 45 countries \u2013 and this explains, even if it does not quite justify, the show\u2019s claim that it is \u201cthe most diverse student gathering ever assembled\u201d. Locating the show is not so easy, I find, traipsing cluelessly among the super-symmetrical towers of d3 (the Dubai Design District, and one of Dubai\u2019s many enterprise zones). I elbow through crowds gathered in knots around maps, there to guide them to Downtown Design, an enormous trade fair drawing in hundreds of brands from all over the world, or queueing for any one of the 230-odd other events, workshops and product launches that make this week the largest creative festival in the Middle East.<\/p>\n What\u2019s driving this ferment? You may as well ask what\u2019s driving Dubai itself \u2013 a liberal-ish responsive-while-undemocratic metropolis less than a generation old, emerging like a toadstool after spring rains in one of the most inhospitable ends of the Earth. Dubai, built by South Koreans, bankrolled by Iranian exiles, administered by European blow-ins, is global capitalism\u2019s last great sandbox experiment before the Red Planet. The Emiratis themselves direct the design effort, and three projects dominate: mass housing; sustainable technology (because Dubai is already living the low-carbon inhospitable-climate nightmare);\u00a0 and, yes, I wasn\u2019t joking,\u00a0building for space exploration<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n