projects
Collaborative Infrastructures
My PhD at the Institute for Global Prosperity focused on place-based values for wellbeing and the good life in public spaces, with pilots in Budapest & Beirut. Building on these neighbourhood-scale values, I explored pathways for collaborative urban design and infrastructures employing nature-based solutions – considered as vehicles to tackle a number of contemporary social and natural challenges. Read my thesis here!
UnBox - Journeying through the lands of metaphors
How can we unbox our thinking, approaches and assumptions?
UnBox is a game-like tangible toolkit that facilitates collaborative exploration of shared understandings via physicalised metaphors. It is an invitation to discover visual and physical forms of knowledge-making via the power of storytelling and developing alternative narratives, thus reframing particular challenges we face.
It poses questions like: “What are our desired common goals?”
Through the explorative journey, players can co-develop shared understandings and co-create boundary objects that are a visual manifestation capturing invisible and intangible elements and qualities. Via enabling creativity, exploration and encouraging imagination, the UnBox team aspires to facilitate the emergence of transformative ways that are needed for more just, equitable and meaningful collaborations.
MOVE Beirut!
The project was born as a response to the Beirut blasts, and addressed public wellbeing in Beirut which is now more crucial than ever before. The purpose was to raise awareness, provide informal education and practical skills to people in an accessible and inclusive manner. The aims were community building (and tightening already existing bonds) via engaging local communities in group activities, teaching people methods and opportunities to look after their physical and mental wellbeing individually, and on a community level, taking place in public spaces (accessibility) thus revealing their potential (the notion of public space is highly contested in Lebanon).
The project consisted of a series of workshops that ran for two months (April-May, 2021), four times a week. It targeted a socioeconomically diverse group of people and especially people who were highly vulnerable of the current economic situation in Lebanon (poverty) having major impacts on their daily lives.
MOVE Beirut! was building on existing research, making real-world impact, working with communities based around the question of what is ‘the good life’ and wellbeing, providing feasible methods to make a difference, and enable people to improve their own wellbeing – in an inclusive manner, based on informal and accessible learning opportunities (i.e. free sessions situated in public spaces). Thus, this project addressed notions of deeper levels of public participation and the right to the city.
This was my first research project where I could combine my knowledge and skills of a personal hobby and lifelong passion that is Muay Thai, with my scientific and researcher competencies, as the workshops were based on the philosophy and training methods of Muay Thai, facilitated by Kru Yai Rocky Kiblawi (Shogun Beirut) with assistant coaches Khalil Ahmad and myself.
This project was funded by a UCL Beacon Bursary.
It can be tracked on Instagram at
@movebeirut.
Plant Microbial Fuel Cell
A plant microbial fuel cell can support local communities via its capacity of generating electricity from waste water (digestate) and growing plants for food. The fuel cell can supply enough energy to charge phones and power LED lighting. It was planned to feed in to a MOOC to enable communities in the Global South to implement this low cost renewable energy solution.
