Design Drafts #4: Selected writersDesign Drafts #4: Selected writers

Dr. Yu Zhang is an artist and researcher based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Born and educated in China, she has developed her practice across Europe and Asia, investigating the usually invisible systems governing movement, labour, and intimate life, and what they do to the people who move through them. Her work translates these effects, such as displacement, disorientation, and resilience, into participatory, experiential installations that invite shared reflection through embodied interaction. Exhibitions include Ars Electronica, IMPAKT Festival, and WIP Arts and Technology Festival. She is co-author of the book Coding Art and holds a PhD from TU Eindhoven.

Yu's proposal for Design Drafts explores the inventive forms of communication that emerge under conditions of censorship. Drawing on examples from contemporary Chinese online culture, she examines how meaning migrates across language, images, sounds, dates, and shared cultural references in order to evade suppression. The project considers these practices as a form of design: a distributed and collective survival strategy that continually adapts to systems of control. It further reflects on how such dialects may transform as AI-driven surveillance becomes increasingly capable of interpreting context and intent.

Bao is a Mumbai-based design researcher and artist whose work is embedded in an anti-caste feminist pluriversal framework and focuses on dissecting the Brahmanical roots of Indian design pedagogy. Their scholarship makes many Indian design academics uncomfortable by exposing institutional casteism, caste privilege, and the gatekeeping of who qualifies as a “designer”. As a practitioner, they interrogate how creative production itself is rooted in casteism and how oppressor-caste designers and artists routinely bypass centuries-old caste codes and traditions, capitalising on design fields through unearned caste and class advantages. By centring marginalised epistemes and challenging the very foundations of design education, Bao’s work demands a radical reimagining of who gets to make, teach, and define design in India.

Bao’s proposal for Design Drafts reflects on knowledge acquired through caste-based craft traditions and forms of learning that exist beyond institutional frameworks. Through the story of an apprenticeship with a leatherworker from their own community, they examine how embodied knowledge is transmitted through touch, memory, and lived experience rather than through formal documentation. The essay questions who is recognised as a producer of design knowledge and what is lost when situated expertise is translated into academic or professional language. In doing so, it proposes refusal itself as a design methodology.

Riem Ibrahim is Associate Professor of Visual Communication at the American University of Sharjah and co-founder of the Sharjah-based Möbius Studio. Ibrahim’s scholarly work is concerned with actively engaging with the marginalised, non-Western graphic design canon, employing research modes that address acts of preservation with a special focus on Arabic typography. This work also encompasses facilitating exchange and disseminating knowledge that enables a critical analysis of Arab histories that have shaped the field of graphic design in the SWANA region.

Hala Al-Ani received her BSc in Visual Communication from the American University of Sharjah and pursued postgraduate studies in Graphic Design and Iconic Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Basel School of Design. She is co-founder of Möbius Design Studio and Associate Professor of Visual Communication at the American University of Sharjah. Her research focuses on documenting and disseminating underrecognised design legacies in the SWANA region, advancing Arabic type design, developing methods for correlating scripts in multilingual contexts, and investigating materiality and tactile knowledge as critical approaches to contemporary design practice and education.

For Design Drafts, Ibrahim and Al-Ani revisit the work of Iraqi designer, calligrapher, and poet Muhammad Sa‘id Al Saggar and his efforts to reform Arabic typography during the twentieth century. Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and letters, they trace how his typographic innovations became entangled with questions of modernity, nationalism, censorship, and exile. The essay highlights how design histories are shaped by broader political forces and considers historiographic recovery as a form of resistance against cultural erasure.

Shaden Abed-elal is a graphic designer from Palestine, now based in Brussels, his practice explores the intersections between everyday life, power, intimacy and space. Through mapping, publishing and visual storytelling he tries to expose how the personal experience is entangled with hidden political and social structures. (His friends describe him as both existential and silly.)

Shaden’s proposal for Design Drafts begins with his experience of living with amblyopia, commonly known as ‘lazy eye’. Using the concept of dialect as a way of sensing and understanding the world, he reflects on perception, translation, and visibility. The essay questions dominant assumptions around clarity, sharpness, and visual correctness, while exploring what is lost or transformed between seeing, interpreting, and communicating experience. Through this personal lens, the project proposes perception itself as a form of design dialect.

mukhtara ayọtẹjú adékúnbi yusuf (they/them) is an indigenous yoruba conceptual artist, writer, and designer from what is now southwestern Nigeria. They work across textile, sound, spatial design, and indigenous material knowledge. mukhtara's practice is grounded in yoruba epistemology, decolonial frameworks and somatic inquiry. mukhtara creates at epistemological cross-roads, muddying binaries between science and the spiritual. They are the founder of Ilẹ̀ Lab and studio, lead facilitator of IndigeLab's Indigenous Art as Method Working Group, and teach Black and Indigenous ecologies. mukhtara holds degrees from Dartmouth College (BA), UCSD (MA in Communications and Media), and UT Austin (MFA in Design).

mukhtara’s proposal for Design Drafts examines how Indigenous architectural and spatial knowledge is transmitted through embodied, relational, and land-based practices rather than through documentation. Drawing on Yoruba spatial traditions and their own research, they argue that demands for preservation and legibility can function as forms of colonial extraction. The essay explores refusal, opacity, mistranslation, and embodied memory as strategies for safeguarding knowledge systems that resist easy translation. In doing so, it proposes the body itself as a living archive.