Beijing Project n.08 Zara Arshad 阿飒

Zara Arshad 阿飒 graduated from Goldsmiths College in the innovative discipline of social design. Her work has crossed many contexts, always with a particular interest in sustainability and socio-political issues. As a journalist and commentator she followed the Social Sensibility programme from the start, publishing several reviews on her website Design China. When she was offered the chance to join with her own work, she gladly accepted.

She was due to leave Beijing two weeks after starting, and the short time became a subtle, strategic element of psychological and creative inquiry. She chose a strongly visual intervention linked to a material already used in the factory: industrial tape in primary colours, which, among other things, marks out the floor areas and their functions – storage, assembly, quality control.

She asked everyone in the factory to draw ten straight lines, in any form, in three minutes. Collecting all the drawings, she began to create a pattern on the staircase walls: blue tape reproduced the employees’ original drawings in unexpected places and at unexpected scales; yellow and red tape then joined all the random combinations into a complex, coherent graphic pattern.

Her efficient solution showed that even with little time it is possible to develop a stimulating project involving the whole staff of Bernard Controls. She completed a large section of the wall herself and promised to send the remaining designs to anyone in the company who wished to continue the work on the staircase and elsewhere.

Zara Arshad’s website