Farasha Zaman, Lecturer, Department of Architecture and Architect at Paraa, was invited by the Plymouth College of Art and British Council to present her ongoing research ' Unlearning to Learn: Contextualizing Architectural Thinking into Practice _ Paraa’s Approach to Critical Design Thinking & Making.' at the Making Futures Conference 2017. The conference was hosted in Devon, UK on 21 and 22 September 2017.
Farasha won the British Council Grants which sponsored her travel and stay at the UK. This award was honored to five other South Asian women who are also working to understand the dynamics and ethics of craft in space making, the involvement of vulnerable communities in design and craft and radical methods of contextualizing an education system. Farasha’s paper co-authored with Ruhul Abdin is set to argue that rethinking the architectural design process, especially when it concerns local materials and vulnerable user groups is crucial to crafting an education system that responds accordingly to its local culture and needs - through a case study of the Bamboo playground in Bosilla, Dhaka. The paper further argues for a new language and methods for design education, especially the issues of participation, that is embedded in local cultures and local needs, and stronger engagements with users and fundamentally, the need of practitioners to unlearn.
A publication on the presented paper is now underway.