#01 Workshop

In March 2017, a group of participants from around the Middle East will gather and work together for the first time.

The MAXXI Museum in Rome will provide an extra-territorial space, enabling them to dialogue and perform collaborative creative processes over the course of one week. The participants will form five transdisciplinary groups, each focusing on generating alternative near-future scenarios and design proposals to address challenges relevant to the Middle East, such as borders, religious diversity, migration, water and food sources, information transfer and cultural exchanges. The workshop’s objective is to restore the conditions that allow civil imagination to thrive, by creating a framework in which one can imagine diverse and yet-to-come forms of governance, coexistence, ownership and alliances.

Negotiations and talks have failed to produce innovative solutions to protracted conflicts in the Middle East. Today, more than ever, people living in the region have lost hope and a belief in the viability and likelihood of resolving the prolonged and violent conflicts. Where every familiar name and idea failed, we propose redefining and exploring new ideas, creative ways and innovative approaches to the current deadlock in the Middle East.

Given the scope of objects, systems and structures that overpopulate, regulate and control our everyday life in the Middle East, it is undeniable that designers play a dominant role in shaping its spatial and governmental dynamics – from designing the button on an e-voting device to the office chair on which policymakers sit while pressing this button. Acknowledging our position as “Designers in the Middle,” we wish to issue a challenge to designers and policymakers alike:

Design always lends itself to policymakers’ briefs, but can we reverse this process? Can design call for a different policy and designers set the briefs?

The working process will have two phases.

Online:
A research and preparation phase will begin a few weeks before the workshop, on an online digital platform. Each working group will share an online blog to facilitate research, discussions, brainstorming and information exchange. This phase will result in the development of diversified near-future scripts that stem from the group’s interpretation of one of the 5X2020 design challenges.

Offline:
The five-day workshop. Building upon the online research phase, the five groups will generate design proposals to address challenges relevant to the Middle East. To visualize their proposals, participants will use rapid prototyping tools to produce models demonstrating their ideas, and will give form and shape to abstract ideas. The goal is to stimulate a public debate outside of the design realm.