To understand the landscape of ‘health and wellbeing’ in Qatar, we visited several hospitals, health clinics, and salons – peeling back the onion layers of a society caught between the possibilities of wealth and new technology and the constraints imposed by religion and tradition. As Qatar’s oil-rich economy continues to boom, its residents have near-limitless access to emerging medical technologies. Moving beyond the idea of the 'cure', we began to explore technologies and therapeutics that could significantly enhance the baseline functions of the human body.
High-end ‘salons’ for rhinoplasty and tummy tucks are thriving in the Gulf states, instilling a desire for enhancement among the Abaya-wearing population. Coupled with growing genetic concerns, focused, for now, on the arrival of stem cell banks, the students found themselves grappling with a problem space beyond a prior understanding of ‘health and wellbeing’ rooted in notions of 'treatment', 'prevention' and 'disease'.
At the same time, Qatar’s vast population of migrant workers have strictly limited access to healthcare facilities, often subsisting in appalling conditions. Could the emergence of fast, cheap medical technologies offer new possibilities for this previously-ignored, subaltern community?
With recent developments in medical science opening the possibility not just to cure, but also to enhance the functions of our bodies, what are the likely implications for our health and wellbeing?
Turning a critical eye to questions of body image, cosmetic surgery, migrant workers, genetics, prosthetics, ageing, and gender, the students dug deeper into these questions, identified particular areas of interest, working on a series of provocative scenarios and design fictions.
A graphic design student, Zaina, framed her work around these questions:
What is the perfect body? If medical technology allows you to have a perfect body would you try? Does you consider acquiring this ‘perfect body’ due to social pressures?
Her final project was a scanning device that allowed people to see how they might look post cosmetic enhancement. She tested prototypes of this device with several participants, conducting intimate interviews with them. She concluded her work through this text:
"It is getting more and more difficult to define a concept of contemporary beauty. In urban society, where the hunt for perfection begins at an early age and modified ‘plastic beauties’ wave from the covers of glossy magazines, humanity’s struggle for perfection appears almost limitless.”
Elizabeth, a fashion student, framed her project around these key questions:
How can fashion become a powerful tool to remind us of the fragility of our bodies? How can design remind us that imperfection could be valuable? How can designers be involved in an active debate around such technologies that will shape our futures?
Her design response was a series of fashion accessories that raised critical questions about the nature of stem cell therapy and its consequences; drawing attention to the fragility of our bodies, its relationship to disease, and the process of ageing.
Our project outputs were presented at the school's bi-annual design conference, Tasmeem Doha. During the conference, Anab and her partners led a series of fast-paced design workshops with professionals, students, and other participants from the Gulf region.
These workshops were designed to engage a wide range of participants, getting them thinking about the contours of the healthcare landscape of the contemporary Middle East.
As part of the engagement process, Superflux produced a series of 'open source' posters, inviting students and participants to annotate diagrams on the themes of devices, services, and bodies. These annotations were used as fodder for further discussion, as students identified themes, and began to think about the wider implications of recent developments among a cross-section of topics.
A lot of these ideas might seem fantastical or implausible – the stuff of science fiction – but they became social objects: triggers for conversations, discussions about future hopes, and our own capacity to shape this future.
This was a fantastic project to be involved in, foregrounding both a set of key challenges for the Qatari design community, and new cultural and business possibilities for our own practice.
