Beijing Project n.08 Zara Arshad 阿飒

Zara Arshad is a Goldsmith's College graduate in the innovative discipline of Social Design.

Her work has touched a variety of different contexts and environments and she has always had a specific interest in sustainability and socio-political issues. As a journalist and commentator she has followed the Social Sensibility Program since the beginning, posting several reviews on his website ...design.china..., then once having been offered the opportunity to join the project with her own creative work, she gladly accepted and developed a very interesting, intervention, in which the little time available (she was meant to leave Beijing after two weeks from the start) became a subtle and strategic element of psychological and creative inquiry.

Zara chose quickly to focus on a very visual intervention and to link it to a specific material already used in the factory: industrial tape in basic primary colors. The tape is used in different ways inside the workshop, among which, the one, rather important, to delimitate the different areas of the floor and entitled them to a specific task: storage, assembling, quality control, etc. Zara asked everyone in the factory to draw ten straight lines in whatever possible form in a 3 minutes time; then she collected all the different images and she started to create a visual pattern on the staircase walls with the tape in different colors. Blue tape was used to reproduce the original drawings of the employees in some unusual spots and on an equally unusual scale; then, using yellow and red tape, Zara managed to create a complex and coherent graphic design pattern bringing together all the random combinations of -ten straight lines in 3 minutes- Zara's strategic and efficient solution proved that even with few time available, it is possible to develop a stimulating and thought-provoking project which involved all the staff at Bernard Controls. Zara has finished herself a large section of the wall tape-drawing and has promised to send the other designs for those in the company who would like to continue her work in the staircase and in other locations.