Under the umbrella of the Congratulations project stand two ideas, one of which is called One Hour Contemplation, commenced on the 20th of May, 2018, and the other one which is known as Today Might Be The Last Day, which I started a few months later, in October of the same year. Both ideas are a series of practices/performances that I plan to carry on until the last day of my life on earth.
One Hour Contemplation is a life-long project including a series of performances/practices through which I try to maintain an awareness of my approaching death. During the performance, I will be lying/sitting for one hour trying to comprehend and internalize the absolute reality that I might die at any second. Next, to me, there is an elaborate list of things that need to be done in the event that I die during the performance. This list is maintained based on the situation of my life on the days that I perform and will be updated before each performance accordingly. Contrary to the prevailing attitudes towards death, I have come to the realization that this event is just the beginning of the actual life and liveliness and the one who experiences it deserves to be congratulated.
April 2013
Our eyes look out on a world full of complexity, though the brain is trained to pick only what interests us and makes it seem simple. This usually unconscious, process is strongly dominated by the long tradition of a geometric and reductionist approach to the world and nature. This phenomenon, in the context of product design, and in the hands of the designers, especially those who seek for inspirations in nature, has typically manifested in the form of reducing the natural complex forms and structures to the basic geometries and proportions and changing them to some manipulated and adapted materials for their designs. I personally believe that this common vision to the aesthetics of nature, deprives us of perceiving its reality that seems to be based on complexity. Meanwhile, I believe that appealing to the complexity can be of a great potential for renewing the normative aesthetic language and seeking freedom from aesthetic conventions in the field of design. Based on this argumentation a phenomenological study was being conducted to learn from nature’s complex approach to the form issue in order to achieve some possible renewal solutions. With that in mind, numbers of natural phenomena including several species of birds and plants were chosen and studied carefully. The general outcome of this investigation and observation showed that nature’s approach to the theory of form was fundamentally different from the designers’ approach and, seems that the factor of growth in nature, in contrast with assemblage in design, is at the bottom of these differences. The theory of Design Naturally (DN) is generated based on my observations on the nature’s approach to the aesthetics of nature and more specifically to the matter of form. Under the umbrella of this theory, it is tried to introduce product designers to an analytical and practical perspective about the different paradigms of the matter of form in nature, including the form-giving process, complexity, abstraction, geometry, gestalt, visual abstractions, function, etc.
Abstract: In the context of product design and when it comes to studying the physical forms in nature, aesthetic norms sometime can function as the filters that make the complex structures of reality seem only as the basic geometries, proportions and patterns in our eyes. In other words, although we look at the complex structure but the mind only picks the. It can even get more problematic when we take this manipulated, simplified and reduced perception of a phenomenon as the reality of it. This means we are depriving ourselves of seeing a huge aesthetic portion of reality in natural phenomenon which, could be of a great potential for pushing the boundaries of the aesthetic norms in the field of product design. This paper proposes an approach that revolves around minimising the dominance of reductionist mind in observing and studying the mater of forms in nature in order to get closer to the complex reality of them. This approach is presented under the title of The Theory of Design Naturally and consists of a collection of principles that hypothetically would help designers to deal with the complexity of forms with less reductionist approach.
July 2010
Abstract: The issue of globalization has been a major concern in many countries around the world and has led to the formation and consolidation of different approaches, such as localization strategies that share a focus on the design and management of culture. However, in some countries, including Iran, there is a deep gap between the two factors of culture and technology and its products. The solution to this challenge is to focus more on culture-based design and to seek a way to get rid of superficiality in this area. This paper proposes CAL futurology method as a suitable way to help designers to pay closer attention to culture, and through a series of experiments, it measures the effectiveness of this method in action. The results show that using this method in culture-based design is beneficial and can lead the designer to cultural considerations in a structured way. Having that said, it is also clear that it cannot cover the whole design process alone and requires a combination of complementary methods.
Keywords: Culture-Based Design; Layered Analysis of Causes; Layers of Recognition; Effective Interaction