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Upon entering d3’s Building 9, and instead of asking what we are most curious about, IQOS turns us into the subject of interest and asks: what’s the most curious thing about you?
Curiosity has long been the engine of progress and evolution, yet it is often sidelined in press releases and brand statements for shinier words like innovation, evolution, and heritage. IQOS takes us back to the starting point that precedes all of those, to asking not why, but why not.
It is under these questions, and the art of asking questions in the first place, that IQOS led Curious Studio for five days of Dubai Design Week 2026. The new creative platform made its global debut in Dubai before continuing on to Milan Design Week 2027.
Its premise is disarmingly simple, that no creation begins from a single source. Every finished work is shaped by a constellation of people, places, gestures, memories and instincts, each leaving its mark long before the final form appears. Curious Studio sets out to make that invisible process visible and, crucially, to let the public step inside it.
Steering that ambition is Ouchhh Collective, the Istanbul-born new media studio that has spent well over a decade turning data into art. Under founder and director Ferdi Alici, Ouchhh has worked with NASA, CERN and the Science Museum network, shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Singapore’s ArtScience Museum, and produced Poetic AI, one of the earliest large-scale AI-driven immersive exhibitions. Its Human Cell Atlas went on to become the first AI artwork carried to the Moon. Alici’s guiding philosophy, “data as a paint, algorithm as a brush”, runs through every corner of the Dubai installation.
“Curious Studio begins with a deeply human impulse: the instinct to question, imagine and connect,” Alici says. “With fourteen artists, we are already seeing unexpected connections take shape. Imagine what can emerge when thousands of adult IQOS consumers around the world add their own trace.”
Those fourteen artists, drawn from an earlier workshop in Venice, form the first chapter of the story. Behind a façade washed in shifting electric blue, the studio unfolds as a sequence of rooms, each pairing one collaborator’s language with Ouchhh’s technology, and it is the regional names among the fourteen who anchor the experience in this part of the world. UAE-based DJ Karrouhat and Saudi Arabia’s Hi-Fi offer up original compositions as raw material for visitors to build tracks of their own. Iraqi artist Cheb Moha takes Arabic embroidery, a tradition with dozens of regional variations across the Middle East, and hands the needle to the room. Kuwaiti artist Abrar Zenkhawi’s bold geometries fill the third space, where a sketch on a small tablet is reinterpreted as a shape within her kaleidoscopic grid.
“Our role is to create a platform where artists, designers and creative communities from the region can be seen, supported and connected to a wider global conversation,” says Natasha Carella, director of Dubai Design Week. “Curious Studio reflects that ambition — bringing together local and international voices through art, technology and experimentation.”
The studio also served as the global stage for the limited-edition IQOS ILUMA i BEYOND, positioned by the brand as the symbolic entry point into Curious Studio and a tangible link between Dubai and Milan.
On Saturday 7 November, the studio gave way to the night. The terrace outside, with its tiered seating traced in blue light, hosted a closing party with sets from GT & Jeff and The Latina, alongside a live performance from Tayeb Santo, carrying the conversation well past midnight.
Dubai, though, is only the opening chapter. From here, the international IQOS community will be invited to answer that same question, and every reply will become a small imprint folded into a collective artwork by Ouchhh, to be unveiled at Milan Design Week 2027. If the first edition is anything to go by, curiosity is about to get considerably more crowded.
