EVENT DETAILS
FRIDAY, JUNE 22 | OPENING NIGHT

DESIGN & THE CITY PUBLIC INSTALLATIONS

Opening: 3 PM - 5 PM
Accessible daily during BDW - 22 to 29 June 
BDW18 Parking Lot - Mar Mikhael, Jisr, facing Naggiar

URBAN HIVES
BY NATHALIE HARB

Bees are responsible of the regeneration of our ecosystem, whilst being at risk of extinction. 
Beirut gardens have gradually disappeared as a consequence of either war or reconstruction. Many have been erased and transformed into parking lots privately owned.
Urban Hives is a public intervention re-introducing green spaces in parking lots. The project proposes a platform slightly larger than a car, raised on scaffoldings, allowing a car to park underneath it, whilst offering a little garden on its surface with a small section dedicated to urban farming. The low-cost structure is a module that can multiply to become a large communal garden for the local communities, in an attempt to amend the sterile urban landscape of parking lots and raise questions about the possibilities of altering the private sphere by creating within it, public spaces. 
Each module is connected to a hive. 

POP-UP WATERSCAPE
BY LOOP

Water is an essential element of life and a medium for social development in cities since the beginning of civilization. Yet water, the main reason for our existence, is being pushed out, polluted and sucked dry in most urban environments around the world. We have lost touch with this fundamental element in our urban surroundings and forgotten about its benefits to our collective well-being. In urban landscapes water has the ability to bring people together to cool down and bond with nature and each other. As an inherent aspect of design that is missing in the city of Beirut, LOOP invites everyone to come experience a playful installation that shows the value of water to human interaction and recreation.

SHAME ON US
BY 21DB & DAS SCHARF

An engaging installation that aims to provoke and punish visitors through negative impulses to the five human senses & highlight key moments of inflicting harm to our city, our environment and our planet.
The guest journey is enhanced by entering a vibrant existing public habitat, a natural environment aiming to reconnect guests through the primary sense of community, shared dialogues & storytelling. Enough is enough, Change is in your hands.
Welcome to the place where everything is exactly as it should be.

BDW 2018 OPENING CEREMONY

Beit Beirut, Sodeco

Roundtable Discussion  - 5 PM - 6:30 PM
BDW2018 Opening Speech - 6:45 PM - 7:00 PM 
Keynote by Debbie Millman - 7:00 PM - 7:30 PM 

DESIGN & THE CITY ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS:
DESIGN + GOVERNANCE: FORGING A NEW PUBLIC SECTOR

5 PM - 6:30 PM 
Beit Beirut, Sodeco

Around the world, especially in Western Europe, design has assumed a prominent role in governance and public services. In these contexts, designers develop public services, consult, and train government employees as well as design solutions to social problems. Not only has this move validated design as a serious approach to problem-solving, it has also made for a more efficient and better-serving public sector, especially in urban spaces. The public sector in Lebanon stands to learn a great deal from this model, especially because the collaboration inherent to the design process resonates a great deal with Lebanese culture. In this panel, we will begin the work of putting design and governance into conversation to see how such an approach might yield improved social services, impact political processes, and help community development initiatives

PANELISTS:

Mona Hallak
Mona El Hallak is an architect and heritage preservation activist, currently the director of the AUB Neighborhood Initiative whose aim is to support Ras Beirut’s livability, vitality and diversity, while promoting critical citizenship among the AUB community. She led several campaigns and succeeded in the preservation of the Barakat Building - now Beit Beirut, the museum of memory of the city. She is an active member of Beirut Madinati, a political movement that started as an electoral campaign for the 2016 Beirut municipal elections; and a founding member of two NGOs: IRAB for the preservation of the Arab world’s musical heritage; and ZAKIRA for promoting photography and its role in documenting and preserving memory. In 2013, she was given the Ordre National du Mérite au grade de Chevalier from the French Republic in recognition of her achievements in preserving the architectural and cultural heritage of Beirut.

Katrie Lowe 
Katrie is the founder of Urban Curiosity, a two year research project to learn about cities through five different lenses: Density, Affordability, Liveability, Sustainability, and Technology. She is a civil engineer of seven years with experience in both Australian and Chinese water and urban infrastructure sectors. Passionate about creating sustainable integrated cities, and  working to inspire those around me to lead and foster collaboration. She aims to coordinate diverse disciplines into an integrated outcome. She is currently on a two year sabbatical from her role at AECOM to run the Urban CurioCity project.
Katrie is a former Prime Minister's Australia-Asia Endeavour Award Fellow, ACC-Austcham Young Leaders Scholar, and inaugural Australia China Youth Dialogue and China-Australia Millennial Project delegate. She has presented papers at the Singapore International Water Week Conference and International Water Sensitive Urban Design Conference, and is the recipient of the UDIA NSW Roy Sheargold Scholarship, which has allowed her to go on this journey.

Tanja Rosenqvist (Denmark, Australia)
Tanja Rosenqvist is a designer turned transdisciplinary researcher and international development practitioner. She has a keen interest in public service innovation and governance in both low- and high-income countries and believe design can provide great value in these contexts. For the past 8 years, Tanja has has conducted in-depth design research in a range of contexts; from public hospitals in Denmark, to private homes in Poland, rural villages in Ethiopia, market places in Cambodia and Vietnam and local governments and communities in Indonesia. She is particularly passionate about the use of design methods to create social and/or political change and to improve public service provision by involving, often unheard and vulnerable population groups, in research and design processes.

Joanna Choukeir 
Joanna is a social design practitioner, researcher, speaker and lecturer with 15 years of experience in the UK and Lebanon. She is the Design Director at Uscreates, a London-based consultancy pioneering innovative work to improve health and wellbeing through design. They regularly work with governments on projects such as http://www.carecity.london/ and https://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/. 
Joanna completed a PhD in design for social integration at the University of the Arts London. Alongside research and practice.  She is an associate lecturer at the University of the Arts London, Kingston University and Ravensbourne University, and a fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (RSA).


INDEPENDENT BEIRUT EXHIBITION
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ADORNO & FABRACA

Beit Beirut
Opening: 5 PM 
Open throughout BDW from 11 AM to 9 PM

Every year, Beirut Design Week shines a spotlight on independent and emerging regional designers, giving them a platform to present their work to the local and international design community. Since 2012, many designers who have shown at the opening night of BDW have gone on to become major names on the design scene, both in Lebanon and worldwide.
Bigger and bolder in scope than ever before, our 2018 opening-night exhibition will be one of the headline events of BDW, giving featured designers an unparalleled platform to present their products and ideas to the Lebanon design audience, leading industry experts, global design media, and thousands of design lovers from across the world.
For this year’s exhibition on 22 June, BDW has joined forces with Adorno – an international digital gallery and sales platform for collectible design – and local manufacturing company Fabraca Studios, giving participating designers the chance to feature in Adorno’s first curated Beirut design collection, as well as technical and manufacturing support from Fabraca Studios.


EXHIBITED PARTICIPANTS:

Abdo El Moudawar
Marc Abdallah
Zeina-Bacardi Sakr
Corinne BouAoun
Elio Tayeh
Rita Kettaneh
Toofic Matta
Youmna Geday
Wyssem Nochi
Marianne Sargi / Zeina Aboulhosn
Christian Zahr
Paola Sakr
Thomas Trad
Maria Kassab
Coco Exotico
TARA & TESSA
Amer Madhoun
Nour & Maysa Sakkal
Amr Sallakh
Stephy Ibrahim
Sirene Abiad & Sara El Samman
Janine AKL
Nour Makke

FORUM ON CITIES & DESIGNERS
MIND THE MAP EXHIBITION
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PUBLIC WORKS STUDIO

Beit Beirut
Opening: 5 PM 
Open throughout BDW from 11 AM to 9 PM

Co-curated by Public Works Studio and Beirut Design Week, the Forum on Cities and Designers is a platform where designers engaged with urban issues are invited to critically reflect on their practice. Through an exhibition, panels and workshops, the Forum will focus on questions of representation (tools, methods, politics) and production (positionality, labor, ethics) in design and research.
The Forum departs from a recognition that any urban design activity dialectically engages/produces three social spaces: 
First, the disciplinary space of the studio or office, equipped with its particular tools of representation and production. We are referring here to drawings, designs, and decisions made by “experts” (i.e. architects, engineers, designers, government planning officials and others)
Second, the space of the design and planning intervention (its site, immediate, and wider context). This is a space that is continuously evolving through environmental changes, social relations, and access to resources.
Third, the space of the positioned self, namely the designer’s positionality within economic, political, professional and social realms. Positionality plays a central role in the designer’s relation to his/her site and stakeholders and consequently in how design is approached, thought of and practiced.
The aim of the Forum is to understand design as a practice that is produced by the interaction between these three spaces and the actors that inhabit them respectively. As such, the material presented is a product of the various voices, networks, processes and economies that surround it.

The exhibition features works that revisit the ways designers collect, represent and communicate data. Focused on physical and digital mapping tools and methodologies, the exhibition aims to stimulate critical takes on and conversations about the processes, politics and implications of the representations we produce as designers.
  
EXHIBITED PROJECTS:

Ahmad Gharbieh, Monica Basbous, Mona Fawaz and Dounia Salamé | Refugees as City-Makers: A Scooter’s-Eye View of Beirut
DATA4CHAN.GE | Visualizing human rights
Jimmy Elias | The Multiple City
Mahmoud Al Joumma, Mustapha Dakhloul, Firas Ismail, Marwan Kaabour & Claudia Martinez Mansell | Greening Bourj Al Shamali
Mustapha Jundi | Between Land and Sea
Public Works Studio | Masterplanning in Lebanon: Manufacturing landscapes of inequality
Public Works Studio, Order of Engineers and Architects, UN-Habitat | A competition for housing scenarios and alternative building practices
SMEX & Adriana Basbous | Resisting Surveillance
theOtherDada | Beirut RiverLESS
Urban Experiment : Elisabetta Pietrostefani, Lea Riggi and Pablo Navarrete | Urban Change and Citizen Perception

PUBLIC HEARING 1 INSTALLATION 
BY JOAN BAZ

Beit Beirut
Opening: 5 PM 
Open throughout BDW from 11 AM to 9 PM

CD-R is an investigative audio platform run by Joan Baz probing topics such as memory, displacement and the built environment through voice notes, interviews, collected and produced sounds. 
For Beirut Design Week ‘18, Baz invites us to the first public hearing of CD-R that is the result of a research project on the history of post-civil war car bombs in Lebanon. 

DESIGN DOES BEIRUT*. FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE
EXHIBITION
BY ELISAVA - BARCELONA SCHOOL OF DESIGN & ENGINEERING

Beit Beirut
Opening: 5 PM 
Open throughout BDW from 11 AM to 9 PM

Design Does collectively explores how design tackles the challenges faced by society, at times offering improvements and, at others, doing just the opposite. Conceived to transcend the limits of space, time and conventional formats, this project explores the responsibility that lies with design and its impact on industry, people, social systems and cultural values. Design Does questions the designer’s role today and in the future as a provider of solutions, humanist, strategist and/or agent of change.
Design Does, is a project that comprises an exhibition, workshop days, conferences and a book.

CURIOUS EXTRAPOLATIONS EXHIBITION
BY TATIANA TOUTIKIAN

Beit Beirut
Opening: 5 PM 
Open throughout BDW from 11 AM to 9 PM

The Curious Extrapolation interactive exhibition looks at the collective opinions of people on whether the emerging trends and technologies are contributing to a creating a utopia or a dystopia. Visions of the future include using VR/AR to turn vegan, or shifting into a society that is obsessed with reporting any personal diseases to the government by law. This interactive exhibition serves as a critical game, the creation of future scenarios based on a speculative design card method, a building of an avatar, and playing against everyone in the space. The rule of the game: The pawns in the Dystopia side shouldn’t overpower the Utopia.


HOUSING SCENARIOS AND ALTERNATIVE BUILDING PRACTICES
BY PUBLIC WORKS STUDIO, THE ORDER OF ENGINEERS AND ARCHITECTS, UN-HABITAT
COMPETITION SOFT LAUNCH

Beit Beirut
5 PM 

Jointly organized by Public Works Studio, the Order of Engineers and Architects and UN-Habitat, under the patronage of the Public Corporation for Housing, this competition seeks innovative and alternative proposals to introduce inclusive urban housing options that challenge the dominating model of urban development by reversing forced displacements of low and middle- income residents from the city. The competition is based on real case studies in several neighborhoods of Beirut.

BDW OPENING PARTY

Garden State, Jisr el Wati
10 PM