Saym Hussain is a Scottish-Pakistani designer based in London. He is a recent graduate from the new MEng Design Engineering programme at Imperial College London’s Dyson School - an institution developed from a long-standing culture of design innovation at Imperial since the Great Exhibition of 1851. The degree is the school’s third and newest programme, joining the well-renowned IDE and GID programmes that are jointly run with the Royal College of Art.
Saym’s work combines design, engineering, and foresight practice with a deep engagement of visual cultures, social sciences, and politics to genuinely understand the micro and macro perspectives that shape people, systems, and environments. Through this cross-disciplinary approach, Saym grapples with complex and multi-dimensional challenges, with his work often transitioning between different mediums of research and implementation to target root problems.
Saym takes on an ontological approach to design, understanding that, through design, we affect the world we live in and therefore shape our ways of being. Thus, design is a responsibility that carries social, political, and cultural influence, affecting how we perceive the past, experience the present, and navigate futures.
His recent work Design for Distributive Agency explores the future of design practice. It formalises a new meta-theoretical framework of designing informed by the socio-political, cultural, technological, and environmental changes of the 2020s. The framework focuses on how designers can create equity and afford agency in a period when inequality is rising, human rights are withering, and technology threatens ways of being.
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