Architecture, Product Design & Sustainability

Nada Debs — Centuries of Arabic Motifs Resurface in Contemporary Design

Nada Debs, a Beirut-based furniture, home, and accessory designer uses cultural influences from at least four regions from where she has lived: Lebanon, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom — merging them into striking product lines that might seem more appropriate coming from Milan, London, Tokyo, Paris, or New York instead of Lebanon. Yet, while her work is stylish and modern, she imposes, none-too-subtly, timeless Arabic motifs that compliment her modernist approach resulting in pieces that function outside of their original Lebanese territory into a contemporary international aesthetic. read more

Moving Pakistan Toward Sustainability — Beginning with Trash

Twenty years ago, Nargis Latif began Gul Bahao (Flow of Flowers) as a research project to propel Pakistan into the twenty-first century, and in doing so, she learned that industry depends on nature, and that business and manufacturing needed to change how they functioned in a way that did not damage nature while conducting business or making things. She began her endeavor in the same place other countries began their sustainability efforts: in the trash. read more

Compelling Words in Public Space: French-Tunisian Artist, eL seed, Writing on the Walls of The World

Words written in Arabic invoke a variety of responses from Latin-based language speakers. One one hand, Arabic appears otherly and foreign — the language of people enduring political and social conflict — a secret code perhaps, disguising malicious intent. On the other hand, Arabic writing is a historically recognized conveyor of poetry, music, philosophy, doctrine, and verse. The letters, always cursive, never Gothic, flow right-to-left in the opposite direction from that of the inquisitive West. An extremely orderly language in its Modern Standard or classical form, it is somewhat ironic that its speakers, obsessed with maintaining its complex written and pronounced nuances, has respected, encouraged, and subsidized free and creative graphical interpretations by its artists throughout centuries, and it continues today on a startling scale as demonstrated by poet-artist, eL seed. read more

Recreating What’s Destroyed: How Displaced Syrians Rebuild the Past

Mahmoud Hariri recreates a model of Palmyra using clay and wooden kebab skewers. Photo: Christopher Herwig.

Even before peace can even be imagined in Syria, there are already plans underway to renovate antiquities destroyed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levent when they took control of the central Syria in 2015. The United Nations and UNESCO have both pledged support to reconstruct Palmyra, an important site of ruins dating back to two thousand years BC. But while war rages on, Syrians in Za’atari refugee camp begin reconstruction on a much smaller scale. read more

Iranian Women and Their Robots

Embed from Getty Images

The women are on board for the RoboCup IranOpen 2016, an international research and educational initiative whose purpose is to increase exploration of artificial intelligence along with supporting technology and engineering. And of course, being Iran, the presiding themes are those of domination of one group over another — conquering those who oppose you — aggressively undermining opponents — or, as they like to call it, soccer. read more