Art

In the West there has been much attention on the rise of interest in STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art Mathematics) as the new foundation of economies driven by creative innovation and new combinations of knowledge.
space designates how we as users occupy a place, how we move through and how we inhabit a ‘place’. Space could be measured by distance and the time we use to travel trough it, either walking, running or by our vision and hearing, just by standing or sitting.
Great designed space is not measurable or quantifiable as other ‘elements’ play a role in defining great space. Sensation of a space is defined by feelings; the impression certain materials composing the space make us feel , how views make us react, how smells resonate on our memories and how colours are capable of making us feel happy, sad, excited, frightened, uncomfortable and angry.
The proposed paper/presentation provides an insight on a design lead approach towards collaborations between interior design and entrepreneurship professors inside (and outside) the studio.
Students were given real spaces with contemporary mandates from best practices in entrepreneurship to develop a university-based incubator and a university based entrepreneurship consultancy centre. The demographic were  Emirati female students who had no prior exposure to work experience and limited knowledge of what entrepreneurship was, yet were able to research, design, test and present their designs with professionalism, ambition, creativity and a healthy demonstration of skills development. When compared with past courses not done in collaboration, students responded positively as they were better able to engage with a potential professional client and engage in a real life-like project. Students engaged in discussions regarding the design needs of the client and produced meaningful design proposals. The opportunity exposed the students to the need for multidisciplinary spaces in which they found pragmatic and poetic design proposals. The experience also created an opportunity for the involved non-design business professors to interact and formulate design briefs for design professionals.

On June 2014, the United Arab Emirates inaugurated its first architectural pavilion at the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennale. The pavilion chartered the impact of modernist architecture in the UAE and provided a charting of the history of architecture in the UAE for the past 100 years. The exhibition took the form of an archive but was never seeing as a finished collection, but as the beginning of a future architectural collection.

Part of the problem encountered during the gathering of the data, was the lack available and accessible information related to modern heritage buildings partly due to the rapid development of the nation.

Modern Heritage in the UAE is defined the period after ‘Etihad’ or ‘union’ of the UAE as a nation in 1971. These buildings are from a period ranging from the early 1970’s and early 1990’s and they play an integral role of bringing ‘modernity’ to the UAE and in the forming of the three main cities, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah as modern late 20th century metropolis.

Two strategies were developed during the data gathering leading to the Biennale;
1 To photograph specific buildings that played an important role to the development of the nation for the purpose of the National Pavilion exhibition at the Biennale.
2 To continue the exercise of photographing other buildings that are not often recognized as higher profile, but still play an important role in forming the urban fabric of Emirati cities. Methods were developed using the photographs for documenting by making elevation drawings and models of the facades.
The second strategy is of outmost importance as the UAE, like other modernizing nations, is constantly undergoing rapid redevelopment of its cities, therefore many of these buildings are rapidly being demolished to make way for the newly built.

In March 2020, the World Health Organization officially announced the COVID-19 outbreak as a global Pandemic (WHO, 2020). During this time, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) introduced national preventative measures to slow the spread of the deadly virus by announcing the closure of schools and higher education institutions, and the commitment of online learning. Teaching faculty at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises (CACE) at Zayed University were suddenly facing the challenge of teaching design through a distance learning approach. As educators of interior design, the authors were part of the team tasked to find ways to teach design without physical contact with the students nor access to campus facilities traditionally used to run the program and its associated courses. This paper charts the pedagogy approach that the authors adopted as a response to the national lockdown. As design faculty, the authors felt that, despite the restrictions imposed on society because of COVID-19 pandemic, it was still possible to explore other alternatives for a particular course, the senior capstone project. The main intention was to successfully fulfil the course learning outcomes and provide students with a suitable pedagogy continuity to the learning process commenced prior to the lockdown.