About
I'm here to make things easier for people.
If you have a good idea, I'd like to help you turn it into something real.
Now
I'm a product designer in Dubai, working on regulated banking — the kind of product where the constraint isn't taste or budget but law, and where a badly worded question can invalidate someone's consent. For the last four years that has meant business account opening at Mashreq, across the UAE and Egypt: identity verification, KYC, the internal systems bank staff use, and the long wait a customer sits through without knowing what's happening. Before that, an IoT platform sold to developers, healthcare products, a taxi app in Spain, and a rebrand in Cairo. Ten years, four countries, and a fairly consistent obsession: the moment where a person meets a system that wasn't built for them.
Before
I studied at the Faculty of Art Education in Cairo — a fine arts degree, not a design one. And I went in with a conviction I still hold: Art is a language, not a school subject. Before writing existed, people drew on walls. That was how meaning travelled. Language came later and is, in a sense, drawing made systematic. So teaching art as a syllabus — technique, grading, correct answers — always seemed to me to miss what it actually is. The degree included two years of field training, and both years I chose placements outside the classroom. The first year, public libraries. Not academic teaching — activities. Children, teenagers, older people, whoever came. Art as culture rather than curriculum, which is what my degree was actually called. The second year, a school for deaf and mute children. I chose it, and it is the year that changed how I think.
The Artist's Book
These were children who couldn't hear and couldn't speak, so information couldn't reach them the way it reaches most people. It had to arrive as image. And what struck me immediately was that it also left them as image — they received meaning artistically and expressed it back the same way, fluently. They had other strengths, too. People missing one sense tend to be stronger in the others, and you could see it in how precisely they observed things. I led a group of six students from the faculty. We visited once a week, and the idea we built the year around was the Artist's Book — one for each child, made of card rather than paper. Every visit, they drew in it. Over the year, each book became a record of that particular child: what they noticed, what they wanted to say, how their expression changed. And communication was never actually the difficult part. A drawing worked. A written word worked. A silent video worked — they'd watch it and understand it completely, because nothing in it depended on sound. The barrier wasn't their ability. It was that the usual channel didn't fit them. The parents were generous about it, and we were given a certificate of appreciation at the end. I have no images of any of it. The work was physical and stayed with the school, and I've moved countries since. It exists as an experience and not as a portfolio piece — which is its own honest reason to write about it here rather than show it.
What that year actually taught me
I understood accessibility years before I knew the word for it. Digital products lean almost entirely on two channels — seeing and reading. And those two aren't equally available to everyone. That's not an abstract statement to me; I spent a year with children for whom the default channel simply didn't work, and watched how well they did the moment the channel changed. So when I later argued at a bank that a customer cannot give informed consent to a regulatory declaration they can't read, I wasn't applying a framework. I was repeating something I'd already seen. And there's an honest edge to that. Because my accessibility knowledge came from practice rather than study, I have repeatedly designed something carefully, been pleased with it, and later discovered it already had a formal name and a standard number. I know the practice better than I know the vocabulary — and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend the sequence went the other way.
Alongside the work
I keep a conceptual art practice. The current series, Required Fields / حقول إجبارية, is a set of self-portraits about the asymmetry in identity systems — the ones I spend my working life designing. The first work replaces a face with the KYC fields a bank asks for. It isn't a hobby that sits apart from the design work. It's the same question approached from the side where I'm allowed to be uncomfortable about the answer.
Elsewhere
How I think → Philosophy What I've built → Work How systems fit into it → Systems Reach me → Contact