Cairo Designathon opens applications for its mobility challenge until 8 November

Designers in Cairo have a week left to sign up for one of Cairo Design Week's busiest side events. The Cairo Designathon, a five-day design marathon now in its fifth edition, is taking applications on its official website until 8 November, SceneHome reports.

This year's theme is RE:DEFINING MOBILITY. Teams from different disciplines will look past ordinary ideas of transport and ask how people, technology and the places around them shape the way we move. Each team works with design thinking methods and an assigned mentor, and picks one of two tracks: Beyond the Wheel, about reinventing what a vehicle or way of moving looks like, and Less Machine, More Motion, about making movement more efficient.

The Designathon is organised by KAIROS CDC with PHOTONX and Cairo Design Week. It runs from 22 to 26 November, with a live jury and awards ceremony on 27 November. The jury includes Cairo Design Week founder Hisham Mahdy, Alchemy Design Studio founder Karim Mekhtigan, KAIROS CDC founding partner Mohamed Radwan, Youssef El Araby of PHOTONX and a representative of the Information Technology Industry Development Agency.

It sits inside inMotion, one of six initiatives in this year's Cairo Design Week, which runs from 19 to 28 November across Zamalek, Downtown and Heliopolis. inMotion is new this year and is hosted at Sultan Hussein Kamel Palace in Heliopolis, bringing the festival's cultural programme together with ELARABY's engineering and manufacturing know-how.

If you want to take part, apply through the Cairo Designathon website before 8 November. The shortlist is announced on 12 November, so keep that week free, and plan to be available for all five days from 22 November plus the jury day. The organisers have not published a fee or the size of the prizes, so check the website for both before you apply. If you are not taking part, the rest of Cairo Design Week is open to visitors from 19 November.