Khulood Alawadi
Lecturer of Engineering Design
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: MSc Imperial College London, MA Royal College of Art
Research Areas: Human-centered design; ethnographic design research; women in design; forecasting for design futures.
Khulood Alawadi is no stranger to the New York University Abu Dhabi community. Prior to her installation as a Lecturer in Engineering Design, she contributed to NYU Abu Dhabi with her research in science visualisation, design, and advanced manufacturing.
With an MA in Innovation Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art, London, and an MSc with distinction in the same, from Imperial College, London, Khulood Alawadi approaches engineering through the lens of a designer and artist.
From her facilitation of human-centred design workshops in Dubai, to her curation of exhibitions exploring the influence of design on health services in Nairobi- she is unfettered by the confines of one single area of design. Khulood Alawadi embraces the idea that design engineering should be viewed as a bricolage, of which, like herself, her students should feel the freedom and curiosity to explore first, and then define second. Allowing them to push the envelope on design theory and the investigation into the ways that it influences our lives.
A challenger to the status quo of design engineering, Khulood Alawadi believes in questioning the “How?”. How has technology influenced the fields of art and design? How has male-dominance in the industry, centered and molded the perspective of those incoming and the work that they develop? How can her mere existence in showing up in this space as an Arab and a woman, change the narrative and expectation for those to come?