In November 2025 BudCud joined Tanween 2025: Design the Unspoken at the amazing King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) in Dhahran as a Knowledge Partner for the Urban Spaces Challenge: Communal Pavilion track – one of the four Tanween Challenges dedicated to designing inclusive micro-spaces in the city. This year, the hackathon focused on the theme “Design for the 90%”, encouraging designers to create inclusive solutions for people and communities usually overlooked in commercial design.

Over six intense days we worked with four groups of participants – students and young designers – who were developing a truly public pavilion. The task was to “design the unspoken”: to identify less obvious user groups and needs, respond to extreme climate conditions and include in the project those who usually have no voice in the design process.

As BudCud, we brought to the Urban Spaces Challenge our strategic thinking and experience in designing contemporary public spaces and blue-green infrastructure. Together with the participants, we tested quick mock-ups, day- and night-time use scenarios for the pavilions and ways in which a temporary installation can become a seed for long-term change in the local urban fabric. Tanween, as an open platform for designers from all over the world, showed us how empathy-driven design can connect the local context of Saudi Arabia with the global debate on inclusive public spaces.

In the photograph taken by our programme curator, Ahmed Ezzat, we managed to capture most of the people we had the pleasure of working with during the Urban Spaces Challenge. Thank you for this inspiring time!