Future Realities: Designing New Worlds

Week: Week 4
Date: 8–14 Aug 2021
Theme: We Will Not Be Silent: on Activism and Protest
Tutors: Basma Hamdy (EG)

In this workshop participants were invited to examine and reflect on current global issues and use methods of forecasting, world-building, and design fiction to create an alternative future. With a radically curious, serious, humorous, empathetic, and, above all, disruptive mentality participants were invited to find out what matters today and how it affects the world tomorrow. Moving between reality and fantasy, chaos and systems, data and dreams, this workshop addressed the issues and contradictions of our time while re-evaluating positions of power and resistance.

Basma Hamdy (EG)

Basma Hamdy is a research-based designer, author, curator, and educator producing work which bridges historical, political, and social issues with archival, documentarian, and critical mechanisms. She is co-author of Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution and co-author of Khatt: Egypt’s Calligraphic Landscape. She has been interviewed and featured in prominent international media. She has exhibited and presented at conferences and art and design festivals around the world. She is currently an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at VCUarts Qatar.