Each November, the Eastern Province welcomes a week where ideas become tangible. Tanween, Ithra’s flagship design season, transforms Dhahran into a living workshop (part forum, part festival) connecting designers, students, families, and curious first-timers. This year’s program runs November 17–22 across Ithra’s theaters, halls, and plaza, with a curatorial focus on “Design the Unspoken,” a call to notice the needs that rarely make it into the brief: accessibility gaps, unwritten social cues, and everyday frictions that good design can quietly resolve.
The Vision: What Tanween Stands For
Ithra’s mission has always braided culture, creativity, and innovation - a platform that develops talent while inviting the public into cultural life. Tanween expresses that mission at scale. Since its launch, it has grown into a regional hub for creative exchange, where emerging studios demo prototypes beside global voices, and where workshops sit next to headline talks to keep learning practical.
As Ithra frames it, the center is a “leading cultural and creative destination for talent development and cross-cultural experiences,” and Tanween is one of its clearest signatures. The energy aligns with Vision 2030, which puts culture and the creative economy at the heart of national transformation.
This Year’s Highlights
Key Installations & Experiences
Expect Ithra’s public spaces, the Great Hall, Plaza, and surrounding galleries, to act as a campus for discovery. Large-scale installations and interactive touchpoints translate research and craft into experiences families can enter, photograph, and discuss together. From wayfinding experiments to material innovation demos, the emphasis is on "useful beauty" that fits local contexts.
Talks & Workshops
The Tanween Majlis anchors the ideas. Short, focused talks and panels bring regional and international voices to the stage for takeaways designers can apply the same day. Around them, hands-on workshops and “day with an expert” labs invite participants to prototype, test, and iterate in real time, an approachable learning model that welcomes both professionals and first-time visitors.
Global Collaborations
Tanween’s guest list mixes international experts with GCC and Saudi innovators, keeping the dialogue bilingual and cross-disciplinary. Media and partner previews emphasize collaboration as a method, pairing typographers with urbanists, product designers with social researchers, so that the “unspoken” is read from multiple angles before solutions are proposed.
Youth & Education Programs
Student showcases and mentoring moments remain a Tanween hallmark. Emerging designers get public visibility and a feedback loop with industry. This pipeline matters: Vision 2030’s creative-economy push depends on graduates who can translate studio skills into market and community impact, and Tanween makes that translation visible.
Tanween Challenges (Design Sprints)
A centerpiece of 2025 is Tanween Challenges, a six-day sprint where mixed teams build working concepts in public view. The challenges run November 17–22, with the open call promoted in September and an application cutoff listed for late October. The format favors practical outcomes: teams frame a need, prototype a response, test it with visitors, then present learnings to the crowd.
The Cultural Impact
1) Local Impact
Tanween is a launchpad for Saudi creatives including students, freelancers and small studios. The mix of majlis-style talks and hands-on labs helps ideas move from notebook to prototype to real audience. Showing work at Ithra builds confidence and networks. More importantly, it shows that design is public work, not only for closed professional circles.
2) Economic & Industry Growth
Events like Tanween grow the creative economy. They build skills, create collaborations, and often lead to new consultancies and startups. This supports Vision 2030, which links culture to jobs, diversification, and quality of life. Tanween’s return for an eighth year shows steady, reliable support for the sector.
3) Regional Relevance
By hosting Tanween, Dhahran puts the Eastern Province on the cultural map for design. It works alongside major events across Saudi (fashion, film, heritage) and adds design thinking as a tool to serve real community and market needs.
4) Cultural Identity
Design can protect heritage while making it modern. Tanween highlights the “unspoken” parts of culture and invites Saudi designers to use heritage as a living library for new work.
In 2024, Tanween used the theme “Fail Forward” to show how teams learn by trying, fixing, and trying again. Speakers from around the world shared real stories of testing ideas and improving them. That same spirit continues in 2025. This year, the focus is on needs that people often miss. The goal is simple: the prototypes you see should not only look new, they should solve real problems people have.
Design in a Changing Saudi Arabia
Tanween’s evolution mirrors the Kingdom’s wider cultural arc. As Saudi Arabia invests in education, cultural infrastructure, and creative industries, the demand for design fluency in government services, public space, and private enterprise keeps rising. Ithra’s role is to keep the door open: to train, convene, and celebrate; to stretch the conversation without losing the audience. “Design the Unspoken” fits this moment: it asks practitioners to listen first, to map the real needs, and to design with empathy for the many.
In every sketch, prototype, and conversation at Tanween, there’s a glimpse of a Saudi future guided by real needs and smart ideas. A future where creativity is not a side event but a daily habit shared in public.
Follow the Kingdom’s Cultural Calendar
Subscribe to Saudi Cultures for weekly updates on events, heritage, and voices across the Kingdom.