Doctor of design

Dr Taha Al Douri
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It doesn’t matter to me that a student simply follows the rules; it’s more important to me that they believe in them and follow them out of self-enrichment. I always say to them, ‘Don’t take a course because it’s in the curriculum, examine your own reasons for taking the course. It will change the experience completely’.

What do you tell students is the key to becoming a good designer? 

Al Douri: Because we teach design, you cannot separate the ability of the student to produce work that reflects their own mind set, their psychology, the temperature of the room or the colour of the walls. By the very nature of the subject, the students develop very sensitive clusters of feelings about everything. We encourage them to become living radars. We try to encourage them to see and feel and experience everything around them.

I always tell them, ‘The minute you start talking about something around you and no one else in the room seems to see it, you know you’ve developed the senses you need to become a good designer’. That’s really the nucleus of good design; you need to see more and dwell on it and extrapolate it mentally, especially when it’s not evident to others around you.    

In your projects, do you try to adhere to a specific design theory or is it completely contextual?

Al Douri: They’re not mutually exclusive. Context is a philosophy. Architecture is a secondary text. The need for design is never design itself. It is always a response to something external, whether it’s social or political or cultural. Necessity is a highly defining element of what will happen in a space.

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Architectural revelations are probabilities. When you have a blank space and you design it a certain way, you never know what will happen in that space once it’s inhabited. As an architect or designer, you only present an opportunity or occasion or probability for something. Secondly, the design job never really ends with the work of a designer. Inevitably, people use spaces in different ways and the designers simply need to let go.

Architecture often reflects the history of a city. Does having a historian father influence your work?

Al Douri: Of course. If you perceive history as passage to a theoretical conclusion and speculative thinking, it’s indispensable not just relevant. Was my upbringing relevant? Yes, it was as relevant as the cereal I was fed as a baby. It is part of my make-up; it is part of who I have become and I always taught my students that history is a lesson of humility.

As great as we have become as a civilisation, the projects we work on today are not really the greatest or the best or the highest or the tallest. Those who worked before us had much fewer means than we do and they did things that we are still dwarfed by; they did things that we still cannot even fathom. The reality of the matter is that when you see what’s been done before, you realise how much work you still have to do.

The other thing history teaches us, which is especially important for design, is to be original. I always say to them, ‘Make all the mistakes you want, but don’t repeat mistakes. Make original mistakes. Be original even in your mistakes’.

What lessons do you try to impart on your students?

Al Douri: I always teach the students, one way or another, about Plato’s concept of happiness. I try to teach them that they should not wait for their life to begin.

Within our lives we all have the ingredients to find happiness if we know how to articulate it. That starts with knowing one’s own desires, affinities and tendencies. In identifying where you find joy, you will excel. Even with the most mundane things, we are entitled to enjoy them. 

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