learn. reflect. design to act. empower. engage.
design to act. design to act is a collection of projects I have worked on over the last 9 years - across geographies, industries, practices and job descriptions. At a glance, they appear eclectic - each project addresses a specific, contextual challenge - but look deeper, and the connections begin to appear. All of the work is underpinned by four principles: the problem is seen from a systemic lens, the process is driven by an empathetic intentionality; the (re)solution is produced through a participatory approach and the practice is reflective of its tools and methods.
The work spans broadly four domains—urbanism, education, finance and media—and my role in each project is one or more of strategist, researcher, facilitator or maker. The design methodology used depends on the desired impact—experience design to engage people; service design to empower them; communication design to create learning moments or speculative design to make them reflect critically. Irrespective of their domain, design methodology, my role and how they engage the user, participant or viewer, all projects are designed to inspire meaningful action.
PRINCIPLES Systemic
Empathetic
Participatory
Reflective
DOMAIN
METHODOLOGY
ROLES
Urbanism Education Media Finance
Experience Design Service Design Communication Design Speculative Design
Strategist Researcher Facilitator Maker
2011 2013 2014
2015 2016
2017
Samovar NYC Office of Public Imagination Maker Mender Universal Gesture Control Training Program Brick + Beam Detroit The Real Threat The Floodscape Participatory Civic Engagement SPRING Accelerator playground Civic Atlas Future of Mobility Parkscapes
Experience Service Experience Speculative Service + Experience Communication Communication Experience Experience Experience + Communication Experience Speculative Communication
Samovar
Port Grand, Karachi | June 2011 - September 2012
How might we transform a quotidian beverage into a transportive experience? Strategist Maker Service Design Experience Design Urbanism
Pakistan’s favorite beverage is tea, and it is consumed without frills. The city boasted a vibrant teahouse culture until 1980s, but failed to keep it alive through the violence of 90s and post-9/11 terrorism. The challenge was to take a ubiquitously consumed beverage, and turn it into a rich experience centered on the city’s history and cosmopolitan culture. Samovar Tea & Coffee House was set up as a pop-up experience on a refurbished bridge at the harbour, overlooking Karachi sea port. Themed around travel and journeys, the teahouse was designed to evoke memories of distant spaces, both geographic and temporal.
act. empower. design to engage. learn. reflect.
The theme was manifested across the experience. The name, Samovar, comes from a utensil that is used for tea preperation across Central Asia, Middle East & Eastern Europe. The menu, designed by a colleague, was a map with teas as destinations. The map evovled over time, as the menu changed, giving repeated visitors an artefact to look forward to. The playlist was curated to include a combination of experimental trip hop tracks complimented with classical jazz. Complemented by the sights and sounds of the port—fog horns, sea gulls, an occasional steam engine—the experience lent both, a vague familiarity, and a definitive sense of being transported.
NYC Office of Public Imagination Parsons The New School for Design | Fall 2013
How might we design a civic agency that is lean, informed & responsive to citizens? Strategist Researcher Service Design Urbanism
The New York City Office of Public Imagination was a fictitious public agency crafted as part of a design studio themed Public & Collaborative. We rooted the fictional agency in the real context of East River Waterfront, and conducted site-specific interventions — a sidewalk pop up lounge in the Lower East side, a visioning activity using plexiglass Imagination Boards in the East River Park, and a two-day interactive exhibit at an LES storefront. The interventions helped test our assumptions around a more playful and human-centered civic engagement process.
act. empower. design to engage. learn. reflect.
Here is what we learnt. With their large, clear surface framing views of the park, the plexiglass Imagination Boards sparked people’s curiosity. Bright acrylic markers drew them in to write or draw their thoughts. The stickiness of the boards created possibilities for deeper conversations with people. The boards particularly drew children in. Their whimsical drawings in response to the prompt “How Do You Imagine Your Park?” provided entry points for parents and adults to share personal anecdotes about the site, their relationship to it, and their aspirations for it. These personal coversations provided a more empathetic view of the community vision than a survey or townhall.
reflect. act. design to empower. engage. learn.
Maker Mender
Parsons The New School for Design | Fall 2014
How might we build climate resilience through community? Researcher Facilitator Maker Experience Design Urbanism
When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in 2012, city residents realised that power, and systems run on electricity, were the first ones to collapse. Resilience, therefore, should include building humancentered systems that can survive when technology fails. Maker Mender was therefore designed as a community experience that brought together local residents to share sustainable skills and practices in the context of disaster-preparedness. A series of events were prototyped at a workshop in Brooklyn that brought together community members to share skills such as composting, making a DIY stove, detergent, deodorants etc.
Universal Gesture Control Training Program Parsons The New School for Design | Spring 2014
How might we use fiction to critique the present?
Researcher Maker Speculative Design Media
The Universal Gesture Control Training Program is a relic from a world where technology has exacerbated existing global inequalities. In this volatile, dangerous world, “technoilliterate citizens of failed states are clamouring for refuge in the techno-havens of the developed world.” The artefacts—a study carrell, a manual, and a training video—point to a State Department sanctioned “global re-literacy program” that aims to spread techno-literacy.” The project raises questions about imperialism—historical, present and prospective—and was displayed at an exhibition titled How Things Don’t Work: the Dreamspace of Victor Papanek.
engage. learn. design to reflect. act. empower.
Brick + Beam Detroit Parsons The New School for Design | Spring 2015
How might we create a vibrant community around home rehabilitation in Detroit? Researcher Facilitator Maker Service Design Urbanism
A team of Parsons students worked with the Brick + Beam Detroit—a community for property owners, tradespeople, and building rehabbers working to support rehabilitation and reinvestment in Detroit—to prototype and test components of their proposed service ecosystem as part of an Urban Prototyping Lab set up by IDEO, Knight Foundation and Parsons. Out of several initial ideas including social networking, a process guide, neighborhood tours, an online forum and a resource directory, we chose to prototype two that would be pivotal for starting Brick + Beam: a welcome kit and story mapping.
reflect. act. design to empower. engage. learn.
Over a weekend in Detroit, we hosted a series of prototyping activities. A community event brought together 120 people interested in building rehab. Participants mapped their projects on the story map, shared their rehab stories, composed their ideal welcome kits and engaged in conversations around food. We also visited two rehabbed homes to learn about the process and resources they used, and how our prototypes could be helpful to them. We tested a checklist from the prototype welcome kit thorough an immersive site visit - taking on the role of someone interested in buying a property to rehab, and inspecting homes on the market.
empower. engage. design to learn. reflect. act.
The Floodscape
Parsons The New School for Design | Fall 2014
How might we use maps to tell better stories?
Researcher Maker Communication Design Media
From 2010 - 12, Pakistan witnessed some of the worst floods in living memory. I saw it first-hand in the newsroom, and struggled to share the extent of the damage caused across the country. For a story spanning this scale, maps are crucial to build an understanding. There were plenty of on-ground reports and photos, but few maps to complement those, and present a more comprehensive picture. I revisited this challenge a few years later in a GIS class. The Floodscape explores and maps the impact of three years of historic floods on the country in general, and on five of the worst-affected districts in particular.
The project also conducts a cartographic analysis to determine suitable sites for refugee camps in the region an issue that was highly political and polarising at the time of the floods. Most importantly, the project attempts to craft a visual language around maps that is publicly accessible, in contrast to similar work done at the time of floods by organizations like the UN and USAID that worked with national disaster management agencies. Their maps were publicly available, but their technicality rendered them inaccessible for publishing in newspapers. The Floodscape explores a simpler design language that could be used in popular media.
reflect. act. design to empower. engage. learn.
Participatory Civic Engagement Parsons The New School for Design | Spring 2015
How might we design a more inclusive civic engagement process? Strategist Researcher Facilitator Maker Experience Design Urbanism
My graduate thesis built on my interest in urbanism and governance, and explored frameworks and tools for civic engagement in challenging urban contexts. I worked with Partnership for Parks, a joint program between NYC Parks Department & City Parks Foundation, on enhancing their tools that helped communities participate in the design of their parks. My practice was based around Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem, a rapidly transforming, and challenging, community. For my thesis, I augmented existing placemaking tools with principles from conflict transformation & design futuring.
Imagination Boards I went back to the Imagination Board, initially designed as part of a group project in Fall 2013, and pushed it through an iterative design and testing process against existing visioning tools. The first iteration was set up at the Street Games Festival in Thomas Jefferson Park, as an A/B test against the existing Story Map tool. I set up a transparent acrylic board with park outlines alongside an opaque, paper-based version, and provided sticker prompts for both. The Imagination Board solicited four times more input from participants than the Story Map, particularly from children and teens—the most dominant, and often ignored, park users.
The second iteration was set up in the same location, two weeks later, at the Catalyst Festival, and tested against a Model Making activity. In this instance, we observed that the Imagination Board supplemented the Model Making activity. It provided an opportunity to engage older park users, mostly parents, on their vision for the park while their children engaged in the more tangible, craft-based model-making activity. Learnings from these iterations were used to formalise the Imagination Boards as an on-site Visioning tool, and proposed to be included in the official toolkit of People Make Parks.
Community Futures While the Imagination Board helps solicit community vision, how might we go from vision to action—from strategy to tactics? I sat through a number of Community Board meetings and Listening Sessions, and observed the perils of unstrcutured conversations. Borrowing the design futuring cone, and undergridding it with principles from conflict transformation, I designed a structured workshop tool, Community Futures that helps bring transparency to the visioning and planning process, and build trust amongst stakeholders. Community Futures helps participants co-create a
shared future by articulating and negotiating competing visions, and build a tactical blueprint to achieve the shared vision. Unlike other workshop tools, it embraces the politics of the process: it is not just concerned with what is created, but how it is created. A prototype of the tool was tested during a Listening Session with community groups and residents in East Harlem, organised by Partnership for Parks. The activities were easy to understand and follow, but building a tactical blueprint requires more time and effort than expected. The tool will need further iterations and refinements before it is formalized.
SPRING Accelerator fuseproject | Summer 2017
How might we design a more focused & relevant accelerator program? Researcher Experience Design Other
SPRING is an accelerator working with growth-oriented businesses on innovations that can transform the lives of adolescent girls aged 10-19 living across East Africa and South Asia. I worked with fuseproject as a Design Researcher for the accelerator’s second cohort selection and curriculum design research in South Asia. I worked with a partner to conduct site visits, structured interviews and card sorting activities with ten businesses across Pakistan. The research was synthesized at a workshop in Nepal, to assist the design teams at fuseproject in selecting candidates and their curricular needs.
empower. engage. design to learn. reflect. act.
empower. engage. design to learn. reflect. act.
playground Habib University | 2016 – 18
How might we use design to enhance the learning experience? Strategist Researcher Facilitator Maker Service Design Experience Design Communication Design Education
Habib University is a new undergraduate liberal arts and sciences college in Karachi that brings together four disparate disciplines— Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Social Development & Policy, and Communication &Design— threaded together with a common liberal arts core. Each discipline came with its distinct research, making, and pedagogical culture, and led to some interesting, organic interplay, but the core challenge remained: how do we combine the expertise of these distinct disciplines to address complex, contextual, transdisciplinary challenges, particularly in the global south?
We started in December 2015 with a design thinking workshop, led by Stanford d’school’s executive director Sarah Stein Greenberg, where the faculty, staff and students addressed: How Might We enhance student learning experiences? Following the workshop, a faculty taskforce was set up to understand and document the existing collaboration and making landscape at the university. As head of the task force, I conducted several rounds of focus groups over Spring 2016, and submitted a report at the end of the semester. Starting Fall 2016, we set up a prototype studio space,
cheaply furnished with writing boards, movable furniture and soft prototyping materials, and invited faculty to bring their making activities to the space. An external civic innovation lab was also invited to utilize the space for hackathons, and other activities. Learnings from a year of the prototype studio were used to establish the playground – Habib’s Center for Transdisciplinarity, Design and Innovation. As a co-founding director, I designed the identity and branding, the physical space and digital presence, set up programming for the first year, and launched it in Fall 2017 with a week-long design intensive for the university’s first graduating cohort.
playground is ... a space, and an ecosystem, designed exclusively for creative collaborative work at Habib University. It serves as a gateway to making and design activities across departments and schools. Through workshops, pop-up classes and industry and community projects students will be able to learn, and apply their learning, across disciplines and media - from sewing to 3D printing, photography to film, board games to phone apps, wood work to metal work, and beyond.
transdisciplinary design-led innovative collaborative playful experiential
playground centre for transdisciplinarity, design & innovation
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centre for transdisciplinarity, design & innovation
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creative collaboration requires the right kind of environment. that is what the playground offers.
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want to see what we have been up to and what’s in store? scroll through our events timeline.
Over the first year of operations, playground engaged with around 450 students ( > 50% of student body) from all four programs in 21 unique workshops, spanning 63 hours of programming.
Civic Atlas
Habib University | Spring & Fall 2017
How might we design a grassroots approach to governance? Strategist Facilitator Maker Service Design Urbanism
Global south cities like Karachi are vibrant, but frustrating. They offer the possibility of social mobility to millions, but their dynamism is usually hobbled by archaic and dysfunctional systems of to-down governance and service delivery. The Civic Atlas is a design toolkit that addresses some of that frustration by allowing for grassroots civic stewardship. By providing simple tools for residents to map and document their communities and its challenges, the Civic Atlas acts as an enabling system that empowers communities to build collective knowledge and take action to improve their quality of life.
reflect. act. design to empower. engage. learn.
The Civic Atlas was prototyped with a residents’ association in a lower middle income neighborhood of Gari Khata, Karachi. Through a series of mapathons, students of the Cartography class at Habib University worked with Gari Khata Residents Welfare Association members to map the streets, utilities and underlying infrastructure. A survey for conducting a bottom-up census was also designed, but not implemented. The Civic Atlas gave the residents’ committee the information and the power they need to negotiate with elected representatives and municipal authorities for better service delivery.
engage. learn. design to reflect. act. empower.
Future of Mobility Habib University | Fall 2017
How might we use critical design to tackle complex questions? Facilitator Speculative Design Education
Karachi is the only city with a population greater than 15 million and no mass transit system. The need is dire, but the public opinion has not reached a tipping point. The Future of Mobility workshop was conducted as part of a class on urban mobility. Students used speculative design to craft futures of mobility in a business-as-usual but climate-wrecked Karachi. The futures ranged from clunky buses retrofitted with mycelium seats to para-militarized transport; from a government backed hoverboard project to a Facebook community protesting peak pricing on hovercraft-sharing at rush hour.
empower. engage. design to learn. reflect. act.
Parkscapes Habib University | Fall 2017
How might design help us be more informed, engaged citizens? Facilitator Communication Design Education
Karachi’s parks and public spaces are sites for political contestation, with both official and private stakeholders usurping the commons for personal use. But a closer, on-ground perspective reveals countless example of tactical urbanism, especially by marginalized and low-income user groups. Students of Transdesign Practicum conducted design research in parks in their own communities over a semester. The result, Parkscapes, provides an alternative framework for reading the reconfiguration of community commons, with lessons for designing more inclusive spaces that serve the needs of diverse, competing publics.
empower. engage. design to learn. reflect. act.
The Real Threat
Parsons The New School for Design | Spring 2014
How might we use data-driven visuals to tell better stories?
Researcher Maker Communication Design Media
My work in the newsroom taught me the power of visuals in storytelling, both positive and polarizing. The Real Threat, a data visualization project, visualizes casualties from two different types of attacks – drone strikes and attacks by local extremist groups – in Pakistan over the years 2011 – 2014. The political debate in Pakistan was polarised—the political right blamed American drone strikes for fueling insurgency in the country, and the left refused to acknowledge their role as primary. The visualization juxtaposes yearly casualties by drone strikes and local terrorist attacks, to add a temporal dimension to the debate.
learn. reflect. design to act. empower. engage.
Š Gulraiz Khan 2019. For details on any of these projects, or any other queries, reach out at gulraiz.khan@gmail.com