I. From Milan to the Middle East: A Brief History of the “Design Week” Phenomenon
Design weeks didn’t begin as festivals. They began as conversations, small, often provincial gatherings where designers, manufacturers, and curious locals attempted to articulate the meaning of “modernity.” Milan in the 1960s turned design into spectacle; London in the early 2000s gave it urban scale; Eindhoven offered the alternative model: design as research ecosystem. Over time, “design week” became both a global ritual and a barometer of cultural confidence. Cities held these events not just to show objects, but to show who they were becoming.
For Tehran, restless, sprawling, perpetually negotiating its own contemporary identity, the need for such a platform has been unmistakable. The city’s design community has long operated in pockets: universities with brilliant but isolated labs, independent studios with avant-garde ambitions, galleries that carry more risk than they can easily sustain. What Tehran Design Week has gradually done is carve a connective tissue across these pockets, giving the designers not only visibility, but a sense of shared momentum.
This year, that connective tissue was Not illumination as decoration. Not LED as gimmick. But light as a philosophical instrument, its geometry, its politics, its sensuality, its presence as both material and metaphor. 
This year, the broadcast came through light. Not simply illumination, but light as geometry, light as provocation, light as spatial argument. And Designooor’s Media & Academy division curated this luminous map across four sites: University of Tehran, University of Art, Maad Gallery, Berezzi Studio, plus a satellite highlight at the Tehran International Exhibition on Seoul Street.
Editor’s Note:
Tehran Design Week, in its latest edition, delivered a rare moment of clarity in one particular field: lighting. The work presented in this segment felt deliberate, contemporary, and, most importantly, anchored in a genuine conversation with global design culture. It was in the shifting colors, measured compositions, and conceptual grounding of the lighting installations that one could sense a maturity taking shape. These works didn’t merely illuminate space; they illuminated possibility.
Yet the strength of the lighting section cast an even sharper light on the rest of the exhibition, sections where coherence weakened, standards became negotiable, and curation seemed guided by something far less principled than design merit. The unevenness wasn’t subtle. It was structural.
Across several halls, the visitor encountered pieces that, by any serious curatorial measure, do not belong in a national design week. Works without conceptual depth, without technical competency, or without any relationship to contemporary discourse appeared beside more serious contributions as if placed there through a gesture of obligation rather than selection. And in Tehran’s tightly knit design community, one hardly needs to look far to understand why: the familiar choreography!
These aren’t small cracks; they are foundational ones.
Editor-in-Chief
II. University of Tehran: The City’s First Luminous Chamber
On the northern edge of its campus, the University of Tehran became the Week’s most atmospheric laboratory. The hallways, ordinary on any other day had been reconfigured into corridors of chromatic intensity.
In the College of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, Aidin Arjomand and his team at Linor Lighting designed the lighting for “Contemporary Antiquity”, a project by Sima Ahvaz. The design used the RGB spectrum, red, green, and blue, to illuminate different motifs on the panels, each color revealing its own distinct set of patterns that corresponded to different historical eras. Rather than serving as mere decoration, the lighting added layers of meaning, allowing light itself to act as a tool for historical commentary. In this instance, light wasn’t just about visibility, it was about how light could reframe the understanding of the artwork.
Outside, SEGAL Media transformed the university’s vast architecture into a dynamic canvas. A colossal projection illuminated the exterior of the building, with video mapping breathing life into its cold stone. This was not simply a light show. It was a narrative in flux, a dynamic conversation between light and architecture that reflected the cultural landscape outside.
Within the sea of projections, animated sketches, composed of dozens of hand-painted scenes, came to life, each frame a living memory of stories drawn from the streets of Tehran, its people, and its history. The projection shifted and morphed, merging moments of peaceful domesticity with fleeting fragments of urban life, each one highlighted with the sharp contrast of illuminated and shadows. The installation was less about spectacle and more about presence, creating a moment of reflection beneath the night sky.
In the glow of the projected cat, perched against an expansive sun, it felt like Tehran had just turned the page to a new chapter, one where light itself was no longer something passive, but an active storyteller.
In the central hall stood a stark, declarative installation: a clean, typographic spatial intervention simply titled “Tehran”. Rose Lustre’s work transformed a single word into an architectural object, a threshold through which visitors passed. It was not ornamental; it was territorial, an inscription of the city’s name into the city’s most academic institution.
On the ground floor, circles of light arranged in pulsating rhythms traced pathways across polished surfaces. Designed by Mehrdadfar with Luna Light, the installation worked like a diagram of movement, an illuminated choreography that visualized footsteps before they occurred. The floor became an active participant in guiding bodies through space.
Another standout piece was Hesam Kelay’s luminous mandala, revealing a different kind of structural intelligence. Its symmetry was rigorous, but its energy radiated outward with almost ceremonial intensity. Standing before it felt like encountering a myth translated into circuitry.
Nearby, Jafarnejad’s sculptural object sat quietly on a platform, its golden, orbital form catching stray reflections from the chromatic corridors. It felt planetary, a small celestial body occupying terrestrial space, positioned with the confidence of an archeological artifact transported from a future era. “Jupiter” did not glow, but it seemed to hold light in its surface like memory.
Hosseini’s sculptural installation, composed of softly illuminated, organic, petal-like components, contrasted sharply with the digital precision of other works. Hers felt botanical, an engineered flora, growing gently from the floor. The piece operated between nature and artifice, as if a garden of light had temporarily taken root inside the university. Geolock is crafted from leather and metal using an interlock technique, a method in which components form a stable, three-dimensional structure simply by locking into one another, without the need for stitching, glue, or additional fasteners. The result is a textured, dynamic surface that delivers both functionality and a contemporary, sculptural presence.
Keley’s Eye didn’t demand attention so much as interrupt the visual noise around it. A circular light-form, neither dramatic nor understated, it sat in a zone of its own, quiet, steady, and deliberately unadorned.
Taken together, the works at the University of Tehran formed a study in spatial psychology. They suggested not just what light can do, but what light can make you feel, how it can alter the calibration of time inside a room.
III. Tehran International Exhibition, Seoul Street: Bavardi’s Other Creature
Bamboo by Nima Bavardi stood out in the Tehran International Exhibition largely because it resisted the common temptation of over-designed “statement pieces.” The work borrowed the structural logic of bamboo, not as an exotic reference, but as a functional template: repetition, vertical tension, and a sense of modular growth. Instead of relying on ornamental complexity, Bavardi leaned into proportion and rhythm, letting the form build itself through a consistent geometric language.
What made the piece effective was its clarity. In a hall crowded with objects trying to announce themselves, Bamboo maintained a kind of discipline. The surfaces were clean, the material choices direct, and the transitions between elements intentional rather than showy. Even its interaction with light, subtle, not performative, gave the work a grounded presence that many neighboring projects lacked. It was less about creating a spectacle and more about demonstrating control over form, scale, and spatial responsibility.
If the exhibition had a handful of works that felt resolved, works that understood where to stop, Bamboo was one of them. It didn’t try to transform the space; it simply held it well.
IV. University of Art: A Single Voice with Galactic Scale
In contrast to the multiplicity of the Tehran campus, the University of Art offered a single, commanding presence.
Sarraf’s installation, drawing on the intertwined languages of Persian domes, mathematical geometry, and galactic orbits, stood like a luminous hypothesis. Suspended arcs, concentric halos, and orbital lines created an architecture of light that echoed both ancient cosmologies and contemporary astrophysics. The geometry was rigorous, yet the atmosphere was spiritual. Standing beneath it, one felt the gravitational pull of a structure that understood both the heavens and the mathematics by which we attempt to describe them.
It was the rare piece that felt simultaneously monumental and weightless, an equilibrium achieved only when an artist understands her references so deeply that the resulting work transcends them.
V. Light as Method: Four Studies from Berezzi Studio
Berezzi Studio, known for its willingness to house risk, offered a trio of works that approached light as a structural force.
1.Ali Asadbeigi – Installation, 2.Sepehr Mehrdadfar x Mednoor – Roch Light, 3.Nima Bavardi – “Kangar” (with Waxy) | Location: Berezzi Studio | Video © Elahe Nikoo
Ali Asadbeigi – Installation
Asadbeigi’s work was sculptural, metallic, and sharply architectural. The light did not soften the metal; it activated it, turning industrial surfaces into reflective landscapes.
Sepehr Mehrdadfar x Mednoor – Roch Light
This collaboration extended Mehrdadfar’s exploration of illuminated patterning into a more architectural vocabulary. The piece was modular, systemic, layered, suggesting an infrastructure of light.
Nima Bavardi – “Kangar” (with Waxy)
“Kangar” was the most imposing of the three, an angular, muscular light-structure developed with Waxy. Its presence was confident and almost creature-like, as if an illuminated exoskeleton had stepped momentarily into the studio.
Afsoon Habibi’s “Gireh” is a modular lighting design that blends simplicity with adaptability. Installed at Berezzi Studio, it allows the user to adjust the light’s direction and intensity, offering flexibility for various environments. Rather than a static object, it becomes a tool, where light can be controlled in a way that responds to the needs of the space. “Gireh” doesn’t overcomplicate; it’s about giving the user subtle control over the lighting, allowing it to shape the mood without overwhelming the room.
VI. Maad Gallery: Performance as Illumination
Maad Gallery became the Week’s most intimate stage.
Raad’s performance activated the gallery’s dim interior through slow, deliberate gestures that manipulated beams, reflections, and shadows. The piece was not a demonstration but a dialogue, between performer and apparatus, between light and body, between audience and the boundaries of visibility. The interactivity was subtle; it required attention. In a festival dominated by installations, Rad reminded the city that light is also a temporal medium, a choreography.
VII. A City Learning to Speak in Light
Across these locations, Tehran Design Week revealed a city in the midst of aesthetic self-definition. The works suggested a culture comfortable with complexity, eager for experimentation, and unafraid of scale, whether cosmic, architectural, or intimately human.
Light, in this context, became Tehran’s unofficial language. It offered clarity where the city is often chaotic, softness where it is hard-edged, direction where it is uncertain. More importantly, it offered possibility.
For one week, Tehran was illuminated not by its streetlights but by ideas, rooms that glowed blue, halls that pulsed, floors that charted movement, domes made of orbits, and creatures of bamboo rising in the night.
Design Week did not show the city as it is.
It showed the city as it might become.
