Strategic Sessions & Workshops
Designing Orientation in Complex Systems
I work at the intersection of design research, systems thinking, spatial analysis, and cultural inquiry. My practice is grounded in UX research, human–computer interaction (HCI), and service design, and extends these foundations into spatial, organisational, and cultural systems. Across industry, public institutions, and research contexts, my work focuses on helping people and organisations make sense of complexity not by simplifying it away, but by designing structures that support orientation, alignment, and informed decision-making.
These sessions and workshops are not training modules or tool walkthroughs.
They are designed as thinking infrastructures: spaces for sense-making where research, strategy, space, technology, and culture are examined together. Each offering draws on real-world practice across finance, technology, public space, and research, and is shaped to support leadership, institutions, and reflective practice at different levels of responsibility.
The catalogue is intentionally structured around integration rather than disciplines. Instead of treating UX, service design, space, AI, or culture as isolated domains, these sessions explore how they interact when real decisions are made—and how orientation is either supported or lost when they fail to align.
Tracks
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For leaders, executives, and decision-makers navigating complexity, risk, and long-term strategy—particularly in contexts where design is often misunderstood as aesthetics or execution rather than a way of thinking that enables building. These sessions are educational in form, but strategic in intent, designed to open conversations, build trust, and create pathways for collaboration and partnership.
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For institutions, public entities, universities, and cultural organisations seeking coherence across systems, space, service, policy, and culture. This track supports inspiration, collaboration, and long-term partnerships, and is where deeper interdisciplinary and applied work takes place.
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For experienced designers and design researchers operating beyond execution those responsible for framing problems, holding complexity, and shaping decision environments. This track supports building a regional presence across the Middle East grounded in rigor, theory, and situated practice.
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For individuals or groups exploring meaning, transitions, and personal orientation. This track holds the humane core of the work, recognising that systems, spaces, and organisations cannot be designed with integrity if one’s own life remains fragmented or disoriented.
Core / Flagship
Designing for Orientation (Not Just Usability)
Executive · Institutional · Design Leadership Practice
This is the core session that embodies the philosophy of the practice. It examines how design supports orientation—understanding, trust, and agency—rather than focusing narrowly on usability or efficiency. Orientation is treated as a systemic condition shaped by space, interfaces, services, narratives, and organisational structures.
The session explores how people form mental maps, how misalignment creates disorientation, and how design decisions quietly shape judgment and behaviour. Versions are tailored by audience:
Executive: Orientation as clarity under pressure and decision accountability
Institutional: Orientation as coherence across systems, space, and policy
Practice: Orientation as a design responsibility and analytical lens
From Research to Strategy: Making Sense of Complexity
Executive · Institutional
A strategic session on how research insights become decisions—or fail to. Grounded in UX research, HCI, and service design, this session examines the gap between evidence and action: where insights fragment, synthesis breaks down, and organisations struggle to move from knowing to deciding.
The session focuses on synthesis as an interpretive act, not a reporting task. It explores how qualitative research, behavioural data, spatial observation, and AI-generated insights are read, prioritised, and acted upon—and how over-trust, abstraction, or misalignment can undermine judgment.
Rather than producing more data, the session helps organisations design decision structures that support orientation, coherence, and responsible action.
AI as Epistemic Interface: Designing for Cognition, Trust, and Agency
Executive · Institutional · Design Leadership Practice
This session reframes generative AI from automation to orientation, examining how AI interfaces shape cognition, trust, and epistemic agency. It focuses on the design moments where interface becomes a cognitive environment—where people defer, question, reinterpret, or disengage.
Drawing on HCI research and design ethics, the session explores how interaction patterns, fluency, and speed influence judgment and sense-making. AI is treated as part of the design infrastructure that must be shaped deliberately to support understanding rather than shortcut it.
The session connects directly back to Designing for Orientation by examining what happens when orientation is accelerated, displaced, or silently delegated to systems.
Signature / Invite-only
Design Lenses for Navigating Complexity
Executive · Institutional · Design Leadership Practice
A closed, high-trust session examining how key design lenses—such as systems thinking, design thinking, speculative and futures-oriented approaches—shape how complexity is framed and acted upon.
Rather than presenting these lenses as methodologies to adopt, the session treats them as interpretive tools: each reveals certain patterns while obscuring others. Participants explore when different lenses clarify orientation, when they distort it, and how they influence decisions, power, and outcomes.
This session is designed for groups seeking shared language and sharper judgment without reducing complexity into performative frameworks.
Contextual / Specialised
Connecting Space, Service, and Organisational Systems
Institutional
This session explores how spatial layouts, service logic, and organisational structures interact—and how misalignment between them produces friction, exclusion, or inefficiency. It focuses on coherence across layers that are often designed separately but experienced as one.
Participants examine how decisions made at different levels accumulate into lived experience, and how orientation is either supported or undermined by competing logics.
Specialised versions available for:
Healthcare: Aligning care pathways across space and service
Museums: Curatorial intent, visitor experience, and organisational logic
Public Space: Governance, use, and everyday behaviour
Spatial Analysis for Experience and Behaviour
Institutional · Design Leadership Practice
This session introduces spatial analysis as a way of reading environments through geometry, movement, visibility, behaviour, and meaning. Rather than centring a single method, it brings together multiple spatial lenses to understand how environments shape experience and action.
The focus is on learning how to read space as information and how spatial conditions influence orientation, interaction, and collective behaviour.
Specialised versions available for:
Healthcare: Reading space in care environments
Museums: Spatial narratives and visitor movement
Public Space: Behaviour, movement, and informal use
Studying and Designing Within Cultural Systems
Institutional · Design Leadership Practice
This session treats culture as a living system rather than a set of symbols or surface narratives. It focuses on how meaning, behaviour, and norms circulate across physical and digital environments—and how designers can work within these systems responsibly.
Drawing on ethnography, narrative analysis, systems mapping, and spatial observation, the session develops skills for reading cultural patterns without flattening them.
A core applied module examines thresholds, interaction fields, and orientation: how people arrive, pause, orient, and gather in public and digital spaces, and how these moments shape participation and understanding. Field studies from London and Riyadh are used to connect spatial thresholds with digital interaction patterns, reinforcing orientation as a shared design concern across domains.
Reflective
Design Your Life: Orientation, Meaning, and Possibility
Reflective Track
A reflective workshop using art-based methods and speculative design to explore personal narratives, transitions, and future possibilities. The focus is on orientation across life and work, recognising that coherence cannot be designed professionally while remaining fragmented personally.
Engagement
Engagement
Sessions can be delivered as stand-alone talks or combined into curated programs depending on organisational or institutional needs. For collaborations, partnerships, invitations, or program design inquiries, please get in touch.