A 'Tufty' chair that looks like an exotic plant, window shades made of ceramics, a sitting room, made entirely from plastic wire and wool, all these creative designs are on display at the Design Days Dubai exhibition which ends Thursday.

 

　　The show designer Cyril Zammit says they brought together an eclectic mix of designers from all over the world.

 

　　"We are very proud this year to have the largest diversity of design in the entire world, and there are no design fairs in the world who can really claim to do the same thing that we do. It's fresh, it's contemporary and it's extremely diverse - from Melbourne to Mexico. We have designers from Mali in Africa, from Taipei. We have designers from the Middle East, so you can't find a better choice of objects and panel of different objects than here."

 

　　Nature was one of the themes of the show with sculptures showing the beauty and texture of wood.

 

　　'White Baskets' is designed by American artist and furniture maker Christian Burchard, who highlights wood's natural color and properties.

 

　　'Beyond the Maghreb' is a wall piece made from sheets of wood that are cut when green and left to dry and bleach.

 

　　Designs from recycled products were a major theme at the show.

 

　　Belgian designer Jens Proe, who lives in Tuscany, France, makes cabinets out of recycled paper. He was in the process of making a cabinet out of 12 "Harper's Bazaar" magazines.

 

　　He explains how he came to make the recycled furniture.

 

　　"Offices at the school generated at least one bag of shredded documents every day. So I thought to myself in this digital world we should actually do something with it. So I did a couple of trials with the intention just to play with the material and when I saw that actually the material got quite sturdy and hard I decided to create a line of objects with it."

 

　　British designer Alex Groves and Azusa Murakami make lights from beer bottles and chairs from cans. For the show they were making a chair a day from construction waste and camel leather.

 

　　In Dubai, 70 percent of landfill waste is from the construction industry. A chair on display is made from rebars, which are used to reinforce concrete and from marble scraps, Groves explains.

 

　　"We're really interested in the opportunities that cities present. And in nature there is no such thing as waste but in our civilization there's lots of waste and lots of opportunities for transforming it into desirable things."

 

　　For CRI, I am Li Dong.