I have never been content to wear a single mask. In a world moving too quickly for fixed identities, I collect different roles as a metamodern nomad(PhD researcher, immersive designer, architect, and creative director), always ready to shed or swap them when they no longer fit. Growing up in the Middle East, I learned early that freedom sometimes only begins behind closed eyelids. When reality felt over‑determined, I closed my eyes and discovered a theatre of unseen spaces where no authority could police the script. That act of imagining unseen spaces became the blueprint for my design journey.
A Bachelor of Architecture degree taught me the grammar of walls and buildings, but poems and speculative scenes spilled into my notebooks while I was thinking about designing a cube that does not exist. Earning a master’s of Arts in computational design and fictional architecture, At Frankfurt’s radical art school, Städelschule, I discovered that space can be an intellectual storyteller, an argument, a narrative that questions the norms; my master’s thesis, Uncanny Valley, based on Fukuyama ideas, depicted a post‑human city and exhibited at Deutsches Architekturmuseum(DAM) in Germany. Later, in architectural offices such as Fuksas Studio in Rome and Helmut Jahn in Chicago, I spent several years, 3d rendering and visualizing unbuilt buildings, mostly for international architectural competitions, exercising in making the impossible feel real.
In 2020, I decided to go full-time into the imagination business. (Just imagine if that exists!) My PhD at ASU Herberger Institute began as a proposal about speculative design and virtual worldbuilding and evolved into a hands‑on inquiry into designing immersive learning experiences as virtual worlds that cultivate imagination. Under the supervision of my advisor, Robert LiKamWa, I led the development of Career XRcade, two Immersive Learning VR apps with 50 + playful mini‑games. They were released through Verizon Innovative Learning, and I presented and demoed them at venues and conferences such as Games for Change in NYC and IEEE VR in Orlando. Applying design research methodology, I developed collaborative design frameworks such as the CXR framework and Imagined Arcade that invite students, experts, and AI into a shared imaginative space for co-designing game-based immersive learning experiences. The first two years of my PhD, I served as a guest lecturer and teaching assistant, running world‑building and design‑thinking workshops at the ASU Game School campus and online educational institutes, aiming to turn classrooms into spaces where collective imagination could take shape.
Later, I worked in Tech startups as a UX designer and design lead, designing products that use emergent technologies for playful exploration. These experiences improved my skills around interactive product design, game design, AR/VR design, and product management. It also reinforced a fundamental element of my design practice , what I now call Radical Collaboration: bringing together designers, engineers, researchers, and algorithms to shape ideas and prototype experiences collectively. What began as a solitary game of closing my eyes evolved into a shared practice of turning imagination into prototypes.
Imagination began as my survival tool; now it is my method for rethinking and remaking the worlds around me. When reality breaks, I still close my eyes and imagine a cube that does not exist, only this time I invite the author, the reader, the narrator, and the agent into dreaming and experiencing it with me. Will you co-narrate or simply witness? Every participant alters the story; nothing is assured. Either way, the game is ready: PLAY.