The Playground
The Center for Transdisciplinarity, Design and Innovation at Habib University in Karachi. I co-founded it and served as its founding director.
The Playground was the first design research lab in Pakistan. We started it at Habib University so that students and faculty from any discipline could work on real problems together. They worked with their hands and with the methods of design research. Its full name describes the aim: the Center for Transdisciplinarity, Design and Innovation.
The lab worked in four areas: teaching, training, design research, and the spaces and materials people needed to make things. Courses in computer science, engineering, social development and policy, and communication and design used the lab. Students ran short workshops for one another. Faculty redesigned their courses there with the Center for Pedagogical Excellence. Partners such as Karachi Electric, the World Bank and the Sindh Education Foundation brought their own problems for students and faculty to work on.
Five values guided the work.
One student research project, Mapping Festivity, studied how Karachi’s wedding halls changed over a decade and traced the supply chains behind them. It was shown at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.
From The Playground to Horizon
Running The Playground taught me how much the design of a room affects the way people learn. Where students can roll the furniture, write on the walls and reach the materials, they start working together without waiting for instructions.
I brought those lessons into my work as Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning, and into the planning of new learning spaces at Habib. That work led to Horizon, a collaborative learning space on the university’s fourth floor that opened in September 2023. Habib designed Horizon with the d.school at Stanford University. Its studios, tidal pools, hexapods and terraces draw on ideas from nature, with movable furniture, mobile writing surfaces and glass walls.
Horizon took the ideas we had tested in one room at The Playground and gave them a whole floor, open to students from every discipline.
Inside the Lab
The Journal
In 2021 the team gathered the lab’s work into a journal covering 2018 to 2021. It lists every course, workshop, training and project, with photographs from the space. You can read the whole journal here.
IDEAL Today
The work of The Playground continues at IDEAL, Habib University’s Institute of Design Thinking, Entrepreneurship and Leadership. IDEAL runs design and leadership training for industry, and workshops, hackathons and fellowships for students.