My final-year design project at the Bartlett began with a question asked from inside a crisis. How do individuals respond to a failed state, and what role can design and technology play in governance?
Set in Beirut after the August 2020 port explosion, the project mapped post-blast damage building by building, then proposed a phygital framework, part physical infrastructure, part digital platform, through which residents could organise repair, resources and decision-making without waiting for institutions that never arrived.
Distributed governance, self-sufficiency and physical presence are treated as design problems, worked through mapping, spatial proposals and system design. The thinking behind it still shapes how I approach civic and adaptive projects today.
Design as a tool of agency. Technology as a way for communities to govern themselves.
