Tasmeem - Volume 2014, Issue 1

Open Design is part of the new design wave that sets project sharing as key to speed up innovation and widen access to design products; Open Design is a direct descendent of the Open Source movement and focuses on product design. The research investigates which social, economical and cultural contexts represent the ideal ground for the growth and development of Open Design seeds. Three cities have been recognized as the perfect locations to set the research ground: Doha, a place where money and resources are not a problem, research receives great attention and capital, and the desire for notoriety is at the top of the agenda; Cuba, still suffering from embargo restrictions, lacks resources and money, but possesses great creativity and social awareness; and New York City, with its state-of-the-art that serves as a litmus test for new trends and ideas. The analysis of each reality contributed to figure out the correct responses to the topic.

This paper has been presented as part of the Tasmeem Exploration Platform during Tasmeem Conference, Doha 2013.

Aljamía is a Castilian word for the transliteration of Iberian Romance languages through Arabic script that also addresses the investigative collaborations that took place in Spain between Christian, Muslim and Jewish scholars during the Middle Ages. The concept of aljamía can also be extended to the development of linear perspective in Florence as a transliteration of Islamic science and mathematics into Western visual expression. This paper addresses the cross-cultural currents between the medieval Muslim and Christian worlds as a series of transliterations that overlapped and eventually diverged only to be reconciled in an emerging global civilization in the twenty-first century.

Underlying causes of conflict, inequity, and injustice remain deeply entrenched in the lives of people ranging from impoverished villages to overpopulated megalopolises. To help address these complex issues, social design brings together designers from varying disciplines to address the needs of the community. While universities across the world recognize the need to introduce social design pedagogy into their curriculum, many programs remain confined within Western post-graduate education. In response, two multidisciplinary professors initiated a team-taught ‘Design for Social Change’ course in an undergraduate design program in Dubai, UAE. Open to students across disciplines, the course followed a hybrid-learning approach to planning, conducting, and evaluating learning activities. The methodology empowered students to determine their project interest, cooperatively build research, and value their diverse skills. This paper introduces the notion of hybrid-learning, collabor-active team-teaching in an interdisciplinary classroom, and applies the methodology to a social design course in the MENA region.

This paper has been presented as part of the Tasmeem Exploration Platform during Tasmeem Conference, Doha, 2013.

This paper explores how the hybrid making of Computer Generated Images on the Msheireb urban redevelopment project in Doha may be understood as a distributed and networked craft practice within the discipline of architecture and design, which is effecting the material transformation of the urban landscape and everyday urban life in Doha. We suggest that the evocation of ‘atmosphere’ through the digitalised production of these images mobilises ideas and aspirations for the construction of a ‘new kind of place’ and urban lifestyle, both as an imaginary and a reality, in the Islamic and Arab context, and that, as crafted images, CGIs should be seen as objects with social agency which are central to the construction of the project as a technological and social reality during its production phases as well as to its translation into the social reality of built form and urban life.

This paper examines the transformative role of Orientalism – a form of visual, literary, and ideological hybrid making that has impacted East/West perceptions and relations from the nineteenth century to the present day—in historical and contemporary terms. It focuses on post-colonial revisions of Orientalism and its varied meanings, as evidenced by 1) the recently expanded body of scholarship on this topic; 2) the acquisition of important Orientalist works by museums and collectors in North Africa and the Gulf region, and 3) the appropriation and re-making of Orientalist imagery by contemporary Arab artists such as Lalla Essaydi. While interrogating Orientalism's colonialist and hegemonic affiliations, this paper also underscores the richness and complexity of the East/West cultural dialogue it has engendered.

This paper was presented as part of the Tasmeem Exploration Platform on March 17, 2013.