Saturday, 25 October 2025, at 12:00 p.m. at the Samir Abillama Amphitheater, Balamand University Campus - Dekwaneh.
Building on the impactful collaboration with We Design Beirut 2024, ALBA (Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts | University of Balamand) is proud to serve as the Educational Hub for We Design Beirut 2025, a city-wide celebration of design, creativity, and cultural reflection. This collaboration reflects our ongoing vision to open our academic space to the public and foster meaningful dialogue between students, professionals, and the wider community. Our aim is to bridge the gap between the academic and professional worlds, creating a shared platform for knowledge exchange, critical discussion, and collective imagination. Through this partnership, we seek to explore the role of design in shaping contemporary realities and responding to the unique challenges facing Lebanon today.
One Theme, Multiple Explorations
In response to We Design’s overarching theme, "Lebanon’s Revival," ALBA has developed five subthemes that guide our programming:
- Hybrid Intelligences
Exploring how the rise of advanced technological tools is reshaping our perception, design logic, and the blurred lines between war artefacts and design instruments.
- Identity Through Materiality
Interrogating how the materials we choose to work with express, shape, and inform the identities we seek to design.
- War / After War
When conflict becomes the norm, reconstruction requires more than rebuilding, it demands a design logic that continuously evolves in response to crisis, rooted in quick thinking and adaptation.
- The Future of Our Resources
Mining our past and present to imagine an ethical and sustainable future, one that reflects our values and redefines our relationship to resources through a cultural and ecological lens.
- Time Perceptions and Design
Examining how our understanding of time- past, present, and future- interacts with design, and how overlapping timelines shape our perception of each.
Each theme invites reflection on Lebanon’s complex layers, its past and present, crises and healing, heritage and innovation. To explore these ideas, we are hosting a series of lectures, roundtables, and workshops featuring voices from diverse professional and academic backgrounds. These discussions will address themes such as cultural memory, sustainable futures, crisis management, and our evolving relationship with nature and resources. In parallel, an exhibition of student projects will highlight how they are responding to these challenges creatively and critically. At its core, this initiative is an invitation to collectively think, imagine, and act. By opening our doors to the public, we hope to dissolve boundaries and spark conversations that matter, conversations that reflect values of openness, collaboration, awareness, and care.
ALBA Educational Hub x We Design Beirut offers a timely opportunity to build a more connected, conscious design community, one that is rooted in our context, responsive to our realities, and united by a shared commitment to shaping a future that resonates with who we are and what we aspire to become.
