Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
| When: | Monday, October 6th, 2025 |
| Time: | 6:00 pm — 7:00 pm |
| Location: | Azrieli Pavilion, 4th Floor, Room 450 |
| Audience: | Anyone |
Introducing RE:DESIGN
RE:DESIGN is a dynamic series of lectures and participatory activities that explores emerging and urgent topics reshaping the field of design today. Through a combination of talks, discussions, and collaborative engagements, it brings together diverse voices from within and beyond design to foster critical thinking, collective dialogue, and imaginative speculation.
This series is a platform for reimagining—where designers and their communities come together to question dominant narratives, challenge disciplinary boundaries, and envision alternative futures for design. Each session invites participants to engage with visionary ideas, reflect critically on their own practices, and contribute to a shared exploration of what design is—and what it could become.
How can we study and teach design in a way that is critical, socially engaged, and relevant to place? In her latest book, Design Otherwise: Transforming Design Education in the Arab Region, Danah Abdulla challenges us to imagine a design education and culture that moves beyond blindly borrowing Eurocentric models and frameworks.
Drawing on learnings from work with design students, educators and designers in the Arab region, with a particular focus on Jordan and featuring examples from Lebanon, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, Abdulla creates a dialogue with those who have most at stake in education to imagine how we can develop a collaborative, contextually based and socially relevant design education.
This RE:DESIGN event will feature a short presentation of the key themes of the book, followed by an in-conversation part with Chiara Del Gaudio (Associate Professor at the School of Industrial Design) and the audience.
Danah is a Reader (Associate Professor) in anti/post/decolonial histories, theories, praxes at the Decolonising the Arts Institute at the University of the Arts London. Danah is also the author of Designerly Ways of Knowing: A Working Inventory of Things a Designer Should Know (Onomatopee, 2022), a founding member of the Decolonising Design platform, and founded Kalimat Magazine (2010-2016), an independent, non-profit publication about Arab thought and culture. https://www.dabdulla.com/
