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| Tom Kelley and Alice Twemlow |
The four-day working conference will have student-driven teams investigating the role of design as a problem-solving activity that tackles community issues, daily life-worlds and future concerns.
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| Hunter F Tura, Amal Ameen al-Mehain |
The opening keynote speaker Tom Kelley’s work illustrates the potential of ubiquitous design to involve, inform, facilitate and develop consumer potential and community development, providing rich insight into how designers and collaborators can link together to create thoughtful, successful results.
Within the field of innovation management, Kelley has altered radically the way designers see their own potential to innovate in a variety of sectors.
Kelley is the general manager of IDEO, an award-winning global design firm that takes a human-centred approach to helping organisations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow.
With his brother, IDEO founder and chairman David, Kelley helped manage the firm as it grew from 20 designers to a staff of more than 500 people.
Closing keynote speaker Alice Twemlow is a design writer who moves fluidly among diverse mediums of expression. A multi-modal writer, she is adept at articulating interesting links among disparate events and ideas. Twemlow will deliver short presentations at different points throughout the conference that reflect on the different types of learning happening in different conference venues and forums. These will culminate in a comprehensive presentation delivered on the final day, bringing her observations and learning gained throughout the whole conference to a conclusion. She will close the conference with a panel discussion that involves both the speakers and the audience.
Twemlow is chair of the design criticism MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and an M-Phil/PhD candidate in the design history program at the V&A Museum and the Royal College of Art in London.
Natalie Jeremijenko has a knack for cutting across multiple fields and sensibilities to link activities that fully engage the bicameral mind, epitomising the figure of the designer as synaptic linker.
An inquisitive scientist and innovative designer, Jeremijenko is described a walking, talking, synaptic node who generates productive synergies in quirky, eccentric ways, refreshing everyday life-worlds, unlocking new and curious perspectives.
Jeremijenko is an artist and engineer whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering.
She is currently an Associate Professor at NYU in the Visual Art Department, and has affiliated faculty appointments in Computer Science and Environmental Studies.
Hunter Tura, a versatile and inventive thinker and doer, links both design and business practices within the overlapping framework of local and global perspectives.
In his role as president and CEO of Bruce Mau Design, Tura has consistently revealed the ways in which design and creative organisational re-thinking and re-presentation can empower communities to link both within and without, showing the power of design to devise ingeniously inter-linked systems that produce aesthetic and functional objects and defamiliarised experiences.
Tura’s recent collaborations include projects for the Oprah Winfrey Network, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Li Ning, and OCAD University in Toronto.
A successful business guru, Bowman Heiden is responsible for developing a diverse, effectual knowledge community by knitting together disparate interests through a compelling, unifying vision.
Heiden identifies productive and symbiotic link points by understanding the needs of stakeholders. The innovation director for the Qatar Science & Technology Park, he is responsible for driving innovation strategy and intellectual property policy.
The work of Michael Mauer as chief designer at Porsche expresses a complimentary relationship between stylish, pragmatic design and precise, complex engineering. His work conveys insight into the thoughtful application and combination of design and materials and the splendid potential for design to link luxury and technology.
Mauer studied automobile design at Pforzheim University, and started his career at Mercedes-Benz. In 1999 he was appointed as Head of Design at Smart, where he was responsible for the initial development of the Roadster Coupe. Afterwards he moved to head Saab Design and in March 2003 became responsible for GM Europe’s Advanced Design studio in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Innovator Fiona Raby combines materials and methods to produce unusual, clever and poignant designs destined for the product shelves.
Raby displays a remarkable aptitude to think hypothetically, to project future scenarios, and to see the university as a fruitful site for forward-looking ideation.
Raby is a partner in the design practice Dunne & Raby alongside Anthony Dunne. Dunne & Raby use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies.
Amal Ameen al-Mehain, an interior design alumna of VCUQatar, is a design pioneer for Arab women in the region. She not only creates and makes for her own company, but also reaches out and links with other companies to form fruitful design partnerships.
Al-Mehain currently leads the Design Department at Barwa Media. Examples of her work include the International Furniture and Design Exhibition and Qatar Real Estate Exhibition booth designs, the graphic identity for Qatari rally driver Nasser al-Attiyah, design projects for multi-utility service provider Marafeq, the Barwa Media website, and the Barwa and Diar taxi advertising campaigns in London.
The critically acclaimed work of Dr Naif al-Mutawa, a Kuwaiti clinical psychologist and creator of The 99, links multiple arenas: culture, religion, design, psychology, sociology, and more.
The success of The 99 shows the capacity of creative design to further the development of cross-cultural understanding and to bridge generational and religious divides in meaningful ways.
THE 99 is described the first group of comic superheroes born of an Islamic archetype. Forbes named THE 99 as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the globe and US President Barack Obama praised Dr al-Mutawa and THE 99 as perhaps the most innovative of the thousands of new entrepreneurs viewed by his Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship.
Dr al-Mutawa received the Eliot-Pearson Award for Excellence in Children’s Media from Tufts University, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations “Marketplace of Ideas” Award, and The Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneurship Award presented at the 2009 World Economic Forum.
Mark Heggen is a game designer for Zynga New York, makers of the popular online social networking games Farmville and Mafia Wars.
After studying graphic design at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Heggen joined Area/Code, a Manhattan-based game development studio focused on combining emerging technologies with strong design principles to create experimental new forms of social gameplay. Heggen also teaches game design at University of Detroit Mercy.
Hoda Baroudi and Maria Hibri of BOKJA Design link elegant yet somehow funky creative luxury and contemporary design objects to local and regional talent and technique.
The ability of BOKJA to forge links between people locally and globally is paradigmatic of the potential of interesting design to animate local skills in meaningful, artful ways.
Bokja is a Turkish word that describes an intricately worked fabric created to cover a bride’s dowry. The Lebanese designers bring a similar passion for detail and history to the furniture, which they create under the same name.
Baroudi and Hibri source furniture designs from the 50s, 60s and 70s, unearthed in Beirut’s flea-markets and antique dealerships, and then cover them with exuberant tapestries and textiles from the Levant and the legendary Silk Road countries of Central Asia.
Ameena Ahmadi, the head of Architectural Design section at Qatar Foundation’s Capital Projects Directorate, is a management team member of Design Zone, a new initiative currently undertaken by Qatar Foundation and incubated at the Qatar Science & Technology Park.
Design Zone aims at creating an enabling environment for design thinking and innovation in Qatar. It is to become a design catalyst through nurturing the design profession locally and fostering appropriate local, regional and international networks.
Design Zone will offer a number of projects and activities at different scales that revolve around interdisciplinary collaborations and community participation; aspiring through these programmes to promote awareness of design, and exhibit in the long run how design practices can improve the quality of life in Qatar and beyond.
Essa al-Mannai is the acting director of Qatar-based NGO Reach Out To Asia, whose capacity to link design to community is definitive of its undertaking to contribute to the progress of a community while sustaining its culture and heritage.