CAIRO - 3 November 2018: A design workshop at a co-working space in Maadi, Cairo, brought 15 participants of different backgrounds and professions at one table, helping each other with varied projects.
This collection of passionate talents, despite the advanced professionalism of many of them, attended the workshop because it was not an ordinary course. Organized by the U.S. embassy at KMT House co-working space in partnership with Parsons School of Design professors John Bruce and Mark Randall, the 5 busy days were hoped to result in social impact through design, something the participants strongly wish to ultimately achieve.
Design strategy, service design, or creative intervention, is an approach.
“We’ve all been surprise with the response that the embassy got to this idea, so there’s a hunger for this idea in the creative economy or the creative community of Egypt and the entrepreneurial community to kind of work together to kind of fig out these challenging issues” Randall told Egypt Today Oct. 18, on the last day of the workshop.
Randall and Bruce deliver similar courses at Parson’s School of Design and also off campus in New York to people from around the globe, yet it was their first time in a different country.
“They were incredibly open to us, outsiders coming from another place with a basket full of ideas, I’ve never felt welcome more quickly and more deeply,” Bruce said.
Professor Mark Randall at the workshop - Egypt Today/Hanan Fayed
The design workshop was about ways of thinking of complex systems, what is happening in certain situation from a human level and finding opportunities to co-create a way forward with the creative idea.
As diverse as the participants and their projects were, they all shared a “deep commitment to Egypt,” which gave the facilitators a glimpse into the needs of the Egyptian society.
Empowerment, city, health and culture are the main themes that emerged.
Empowering women, children and youth, education, mobility, using art to engage people in public space, education, are some of the ideas below the four umbrellas. Deregulating office hours to reduce traffic congestion, protecting the urban forest by “adopting a tree” were other ideas under the theme “city.”
“A big goal for the program was that they carry out their projects forward and can clearly articulate what they wanna do to get funding,” Bruce said.
Identity of a place
The majority of the participants were female. Buce had an observation on their attitude.
“There are females who are ready to be leaders, but not leaders in a patriarchal or masculine way. They understand their own energy; they understand the uniqueness of it... So there was a freedom, there was a celebration, there was bonding, there was no attention around that and so I was really impressed once again with these very powerful capable and creative women,” Bruce said.
Participant Hala Abotaleb spoke to Egypt Today about her startup idea about projecting identity positively inside homes. Her experience at the workshop was enriching.
“To wake up in the morning and find so many ideas on how this works with that, and they [fulan and flan] were great advisers in terms of how to integrate all this, so they kept zooming out and in. There were much of joining of ideas that helped me a lot,” Abotaleb said.
She wants to name her startup “Hawiya,” identity in Arabic. She studied psychology for many years, has experience in interior design and hopes to combine the two disciplines.
Designer Hala Abotaleb (middle) helps with a presentation at the conclusion of the Design + social impact workshop - Photo courtesy of the U.S. embassy in Cairo
“The place where we live programs us differently and constantly sends us visual, auditory and sensory messages… if we designed the messages from the beginning, the place will give us messages for our wellbeing. To integrate the place with lively things, like agriculture, I pay great attention to that, so that I and my children will give another dimension for the place.”
Abotaleb is interested in observing how a place “looks like” the people who live in it, and in readying the messages that reveal the identity of a particular family.
“People shape the space, and the space shapes their memories,” she said.
The social impact of Hawiya is people’s well-being and connection with themselves.
Hala Abotaleb - Egypt Today/HananFayed
“ I take them into a journey, what’s your identity, what are the messages that you feel are of core value in the family, so it’s a self-discovery journey from which we can come up with the message they want to create,” Abotaleb explained.
In Hawiya, participants will learn how to “extract” messages from within themselves through art and crafts, and will take these messages home with them to shape the space they spend a lot of their time in. They will execute some of their own ideas, and Abotaleb will help them with the things they cannot do themselves.
This can grow to the level of neighbors in an apartment building, a street, or an entire district. The project may focus on interior design, but people’s identity and messages can slip into balconies, doors and gates.
It may seem that only people in well-off areas will be interested in Hawiya, but Abotaleb intends to make it affordable for people in blue-collar district, especially that Hawiya will organize workshops to accommodate many people.
“If the place already has an identity, it means the people have roots and an origin, so it is easier to connect to themselves,” she said of having participants from older neighborhoods such as Sayeda Zainab and Imbaba.
Many new urban communities, a lot of them are gated, have been built in the past two decades and are still expanding, such as New Cairo, 6 October City, the New Administrative Capital and others. Such places still need much time to create a distinguished identity of their own, other than the one they were built with.
In that sense, blue-collar and white-collar communities will benefit from the project.
Design applied to varied disciplines
The concept of design as an approach began in the 70s; a designer named Victor Papanek said design is not about creating objects but bringing together lots of people who are involved in a situation to understand the complexity, according to Bruce.
But the idea started to take shape and form in the 1990s, and later in early in the 2000s, terms like “design thinking” started to get known.
“Upon meeting this particular collection of participants, I was really moved at how advanced they all are in terms of understanding complexity,” Bruce said, adding that the trainees worked at the government sector, NGOs, in education, art fields, architecture, comedy, and other.
It was important that the workshop was “industry agnostic,” Randall commented.
The two professors were quite interested in a project presented by another female participant on protecting the Nubian language from disappearing. She spent a lot of time in Nubian villages in Aswan, south of Egypt, and figured that despite how proud Nubians are of their heritage, mothers worry that focus on their ancient language may undermine their children’s Arabic, leading to fewer opportunities for a better future.
She joined the workshop to explore means to excite mothers and children in creative ways to spark a genuine shift in perspective bottom up, rather than top down, and to convince the community that speaking the two languages does not threat either of them.
Some of the projects touched on serious, complex, deeply challenging and even heavy issues, but they were “never approached with any kind of desperation or sadness or defeatism… they’re beyond hope, they’re ready for action,” Bruce said.
Comments
Leave a Comment