Untold Narratives: Realizing Personal Design Identities

This thesis introduces alternative possibilities for structuring design education to emancipate designers’ personal creative identities. It was motivated by personal experiences and a series of observations and case studies recorded and conducted at MIT’s graduate and undergraduate architecture and design studios. My study examines a crucial set of dialectics: subjectivity and objectivity, agency and structure, and political and personal narratives. The hypothesis is that the structures embodying students’ relationships — the self and society, the self and others, and the self and self — are all essential to how design identities develop, yet these relationships are often unintentionally unrealized due to the inherent challenge of developing personal design intentions. Examination of this hypothesis led me to instrumentalize students’ personal narratives as a design tool to emancipate their agency through worldmaking exercises, and thus promoting students’ agency in a process of developing a personal design language, geometries, and visual imagination. The study herein offers a pedagogical framework — experimental case studies part of a larger aspired transformative reform — the first running in tandem with core studios, and the second a workshop that followed. Both case studies utilized introspective and performative design practices to help students harness a personal sense of narrative, methods of representation, design language and their embodying social and cultural identity. Through this framework, students cultivate their own personal “worlds,” in awareness of the embedded structures. This framework is a step towards a pedagogically transformative and socially solidaristic project of decolonizing personal narratives – a tale of designers’ voice realization.S.M

Vitiligo: Types and Treatment According to the Most Renowned Arab Muslim Scientists

Introduction: Vitiligo is one of the oldest diseases that have afflicted people. It was firstly described be old Egyptians in Ebres' Papyrus more than four thousand years ago. In this presentation, focus will be on the contribution of Muslim Arab scientists to the field of Vitiligo. Aims: The purpose of this research is to shed light on an important aspect in Islamic Arabic heritage in relation to dermatology, as regards old Muslim Arab physicians. It has been found out that Abi Al-HasanAl-Tabari (375 H.-985 A.D.), a physician of the fourth hegira century, tackled several medical issues in his book, Hippocrates Treatments, among them is Vitiligo. Vitiligo was also mentioned in Al-Razi's, IbnSina's and Al-Zahrawi's books. Because of this, we have chosen to study this disease as its has been the concern of old and contemporary physicians' treatments. Methodology of research: The research type followed in this study is the historical retrieval, through going back to old medical books especially Abi Al-Hasan Al Tabari's Hippocrates Treatments, especially the seventh article which consists of sixty chapters, of which the tenth chapter is dedicated to talk about Vitligo. Other Arabic medical books that handled Vitiligo was Al-Razi's Mansouriin Medicine (375 H.-985 A.D.) and Al-Zahrawi's Managing (404 H.). Results: 1- Muslims Arab scientists differentiated between Vitiligo and leprosy. 2- Al-Zahrawi classified Vitiligo into three types. 3- Abi Al-Hasan Al-Tabari specified a complete chapter to talk about Vitiligo and its treatments. Conclusion: Vitiligo has been known since oldest times. In this respect, Muslim scientists contributed to the field of Vitiligo with respect to diagnosing this disease relying on strong observation and the disease distinguishing features. However, up till now it has not been often found any effective medication for such a disease