Light + Intelligent Building Middle East 2026

WIL was in Dubai as part of Light and Intelligent Building, Middle East.  

Panel

The panel made up of WIL ambassadors offered an insight into what it means to work as a lighting designer across the region and was moderated by longtime WIL supporter, Randy Reid, Editor of Designing Lighting Magazine. Each ambassador brought local projects to the table, sharing real challenges from their markets, cultural, technical, economic, and professional, and how they navigate them on the ground.

Panelists were:

• Jinane Abi Kalil - Moonlight Architectural Squad - Qatar
• Ayazhan Assanova - Kazakhstan
• Alla Fillipovich - 962Light - Jordan
• Ghada Dhwaik - GD Lighting Design & Lumino Experience - Egypt
• Surbhi Jindal - Da Light Hub - India

Also congratulations to our very own Katia Kolovea, who with her Lighting Police hat on, was part of a panel on Dark Skies.

The panel explored:

• why people don’t reject darkness, they reject confusion
• why experience shifts perception faster than standards
• why dark skies do not mean unsafe spaces
• why darkness can be a luxury, not a limitation
• why light pollution is the only pollution we can remove instantly

The full panel recording is now live on The Lighting Police YouTube channel. 

We finished off the week in Dubai with a WIL lunch at Look Up supported jointly by Huda Lighting and formalighting. As always , it was amazing to look around the table and see so many countries represented and bought together by the WIL project: Lebanon, Jordan, Japan, Singapore, Scotland, Kazakhstan, India, Italy, UAE, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Russia, Spain, Greece, Brazil and many more...

Thanks to Sakina Dugawalla-Moeller, WIL ambassador, UAE for helping to arrange.