The Design Clinic: Building Design & Social Literacy
Year: 2025-2026 • Type: Research Project • Collaborators: Dr Peter Hall • Award: UAL Knowledge Exchange
The Design Clinic explored how communication design could support community organisations and local government in helping Londoners navigate bureaucratic systems in an increasingly digital-by-default environment. The project worked with local community organisations and Ealing Council, using communication design as a means of supporting community education and improving access to information and services.
The project was founded on the premise that forms, leaflets, guides, maps, digital media, language and human–computer interfaces could be improved through scenario-based approaches to communication design. The pilot began by gathering challenges experienced by community groups and developing scenarios that illuminated barriers to accessing services and explored how these might be addressed.
The pilot was structured around two activities designed to build relationships with community groups and establish the scope of the wider project:
- A trust-building meet-and-greet with community groups from across the London Borough of Ealing.
- Four workshops exploring key themes and needs identified in Ealing, including 72 Hours in Crisis, Benefits Calculator and Temporary Accommodation.
The project responded to the prevalence of lengthy, legalistic language on local government and non-governmental organisation websites, where users often encounter leaflets, FAQ-style information and annual-report-style documents in which essential information is difficult to locate. For under-represented groups and people facing language barriers, access to services can be further hindered by bureaucratic systems in which avoidable errors may lead to sanctions or the withdrawal of support. The increasing reliance on digital-by-default interfaces can compound these difficulties, particularly for people with limited digital or language literacy.
The Design Clinic also examined the limitations of conventional UX/UI research methods, which can overlook people who do not fit dominant assumptions about the “user” — for example, people who are able-bodied, digitally literate or fluent in English. The project therefore used storytelling methods to foreground the specific challenges experienced by people in Ealing who encountered these barriers. Fictional personas and hypothetical real-life scenarios provided participatory tools for identifying shared priorities and challenges in accessing services and support.
Through the pilot, the Design Clinic explored how communication design could support community organisations working as intermediaries: decoding council services, translating complex information and mediating between councils and the communities they serve. Identifying the areas of greatest relevance to residents was central to establishing the direction and scope of the wider project.
Outputs:
- Workshops
- Communication Design Tools
Photos by Gabriela Vergara Toro | Design Work by Chaahat Thakker, Svenja Tong, Kritika Sharma, Regina González Rossi, Dina El-Nakla, Sarah Weights and Thi-uyen Nguyen.
Design Otherwise: Transforming Design Education in the Arab Region
Monograph published by Bloomsbury (2025)
How can we study and teach design in a way that is critical, socially engaged and relevant to place? In this timely book, Danah Abdulla challenges us to imagine a design education and culture that moves beyond blindly borrowing Eurocentric models and frameworks. Drawing on learnings from work with design students, educators and designers in the Arab region, with a particular focus on Jordan and featuring examples from Lebanon, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, Abdulla creates a dialogue with those who have most at stake in education to imagine how we can develop a collaborative, contextually based and socially relevant design education.
By first contextualising higher education and design education in the region, and examining the issues and challenges that are pertinent to the development of curricula and pedagogy, such as power, bureaucracy, language and access, Abdulla considers the purpose and relevance of design education in contemporary postcolonial societies. She explores how regional identities and class divisions shape the development of design cultures, as well as different perceptions of design and its value. Abdulla highlights design's role in society and the models of curricula and pedagogy appropriate for developing contextually situated design education. Outlining skills and strategies for equipping future designers, she proposes new possibilities for forms of practice and an actionable framework for developing design education.
Copies are available for order Bloomsbury’s website
If you are interesed in hosting me for the book tour, please contact me.
Book design and cover by eyen collective
Countless Palestinian Futures
Year: 2021-current • Type: Research Project/Card game • Collaborator: Sarona Abuaker • Commissioned by: The Mosaic Rooms, London, UK • Award: Research Fellowship, £8,000 • Funder: Centre for Lebanese Studies University of Cambridge • palifutures.com
Working with poet and educational outreach worker Sarona Abuaker, we collaborated on developing Countless Palestinian Futures for the public programme of the Stateless Heritage exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms in London, UK in October 2021.
Countless Palestinian Futures (CPF) is a discussion-based game that creates tangible ideas around Palestinian futures. It centres imagination as an educational tool to build ideas of liberation and cultivate conceptual and material alliances between the very people who are systematically denied their return. Featuring 70 questions framed around near, medium and long term futures under six themes, CPF aims to generate conversations about Palestine amongst fragmented diasporic communities globally about liberation and return.
The project has gained institutional and press interest: we were invited by the SOAS Middle East Centre to speak about the project, hosted a second iteration of the game at MayDay Rooms with AntiUniversity, published a chapter for the book Producing Palestine (I.B. Tauris, 2024), and CPF was featured in several media outlets.
We piloted the game on six occasions which produced different results and interactions – twice in London, once in Lebanon, twice in Chile (simultaneously in English/Spanish), and in Amsterdam. It is inspired by Umberto Eco’s notion of the open work, as it can be read in an infinite number of ways depending on what the participants bring, and they inform the future iterations. The project was supported by a fellowship from the University of Cambridge in 2023.
Visit palifutures.com for more on the game.
Outputs:
- Card game
- Website
- Book chapter: Abdulla, D. and Abuaker, S., (2024). Imagining Return: Countless Palestinian Futures. In: H. Tawil Souri and D. Matar, eds. Producing Palestine. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp.27-37. R
- Six game workshop events: Mosaic Rooms (London, Sep 2021), MayDay Rooms (London, Sep 2022), Centre for Lebanese Studies (Beirut, June 2023), Santiago, Chile (x2) (August 2023), Amsterdam (June 2026)
- Four public talks at School of Oriental and African Studies (Feb 2022), Newcastle University (May 2023), University of the Arts London (May 2023), Amsterdam (June 2026)
- Featured in Amalgam Journal, Al Shabaka Podcast, Institute for Palestine Studies, and Skin Deep Magazine
Game photos by Danah Abdulla | Event photos courtesy of the Mosaic Rooms
Designerly Ways of Knowing: a working inventory of things a designer should know
A guidebook slash notebook of things designers should think about in order for them to know.
Design thinking has created divisions in the discipline: either designers are too theory driven or simply practitioners. Those feeling lost can easily turn to a language meant to inspire creative production in easy to pitch ways, where rhetoric uses design to keep power at bay, to celebrate hegemonic beliefs which are used to indoctrinate designers in bad education, incapable of imagining different futures. If you take away the post-its, the A3 papers and the markers, can designers think?
Led by Antonio Gramsci’s advice that knowing thyself requires compiling an inventory, design critic, educator and researcher Danah Abdulla pays tribute to the late architect, activist and critic Michael Sorkin, whose original list “Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know” inspired this updated version targeted at designers. The iterative list is not meant to be a definitive how to guide, but to spark conversations, to prompt critical thinking and to help designers reconfigure their discipline.
Copies of the first print run are sold out, the second print run, featuring a new cover, will be available via Set Margins soon. Pre-order on their website.
First print published by Onomatopee (2022)
Second print published by Set Margins (2024)
Images © Sonia Dominguez & Rob van Leijsen
RADDAR#3 : Politiques du design / Design politics
Edited by Danah Abdulla | Cover by Studio Safar | Design by Julien Mercier | Photos by Danah Abdulla
I was invited by the Musée cantonal de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains in Lausanne to edit an issue of Raddar, a bilingual journal on design research. Raddar 3 addresses the theme of design politics which focuses “on the ontological conditions of design as a form of acting in the world and the effects it generates in different environments”.
The issue featured contributions in both French and English – entirely translated – on the limits of collaboration in design, intellectual property and copyright by exploring the works of the renowned Nigerian artist and designer Ghariokwu Lemi, the material history of Chaise Sandows, inclusionary forms of typography and language in French, and a challenge to the humanistic reasoning of ethics in design theory to name a few. It also includes the first French translation of Judy Attfield’s article “FORM/female FOLLOWS FUNCTION/male : feminist critiques of design”. The cover, designed by Studio Safar, is in Arabic, English and French, flipped to be read right to left to engage readers in a different reading experience.
Copies are available via T&P Work Unit.