EKA, A202
Start Date:
04.06.2025
Start Time:
14:00
End Date:
04.06.2025
On June 4th, 2025 at 14:00 Azeem Hamid’s first peer-review “Participation as Relation: Designing with People, Materials and Spaces” will take place at EKA in room A202.
The peer-reviewers are Dr. Oscar Tomico Plasencia (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands) and Dr. Nithikul Nimkulrat (OCADU, Canada). The thesis supervisor is Dr. Kristi Kuusk (EKA, Estonia).
Azeem Hamid invites attendees to engage with the outcomes and reflections of the Sensorial Design Residency: Analog+Digital=Sensorial, a collaborative initiative between EKA and OCAD University, held in August 2024 in Tallinn.
His doctoral research explores how participatory design unfolds as a relational, situated, and more-than-human practice, and how participants co-create the experience of place and space through relation, sensory exploration and engagement with material. Grounded in relational design theory, sensory ethnography, and posthumanist pedagogy, the study challenges traditional models of participation as procedural inclusion.
Drawing on participant reflections, material practices, and field documentation, Hamid illustrates how participation emerges through play, friction and improvisation and how space is not a passive backdrop, but a co-actor in learning. The residency’s concluding exhibition at Põhjala Tehas is framed not as an endpoint, but as a spatial proposition that exemplifies relational pedagogy in practice.
His research contributes to broader conversations on pluriversal and situated design education, advocating for a shift from participation as management to participation as mutual becoming and co-dwelling within shared environments.
Azeem Hamid, originally from Lahore, Pakistan and now based in Tallinn, is a design researcher, educator, and facilitator focusing on transition design, placemaking, and design pedagogy. He is a doctoral student at the Estonian Academy of Arts, and holds a MSc. in Design and Technology Futures alongwith MPhil. in Art & Design Education (Research).