Linda Dounia is a Senegalese Lebanese artist and designer.
She specializes in visual design, interaction design, and design research. She is most interested in how technology can adequately represent and empower people, no matter who they are. She has managed design teams that leverage the power of play, co-creation, and prototyping with communities to better understand systemic inequality, and to make technologymore accessible and useful to them.
In 2023, Linda was recognized on the TIMEA100 list of most influential people in AI for her work on speculative archiving — building AI models that help us remember what is lost. In 2024, she was also the recipient of Mozilla’s RISE25 award for her work in AI.
linda.rebeiz@gmail.com
ABOUTWORK
ADAPTING HIGHER EDUCATION TO THE DIGITAL AGE
ALU
The African Leadership University wanted to completely redesign its learning model to serve thousands of students across Africa at distance. I was contracted as part of a team to conceptualize a new learning model with decentralized learning at its core and propose the necessary changes in organizational structure that would bring this model to life. I co-developed and taught the Data and Decisions and African Studies courses to ALU’s inaugural class. As a former ALU staff, I was grateful to have as much context on the learning model as I had coming into this project, as I was part of the team that developed, piloted, and delivered it for the first year of the university.
ARCHETYPES
We first focused on understanding who ALU students were – who the school attracted and why. The archetypes were based on stories of real students at ALU which as former staff members, we had a chance of teaching. The archetype profiles included user journeys, motivations, strengths, and vulnerabilities.
KEY INSIGHTS
Our insights were derived from secondary research into blended learning and critical perspectives on learning in the 21st century from pedagogy, philosophy, and learning design. These insights were distilled into opportunities, or questions to further explore in our proposed concepts: ubiquitous learning, autonomy, meaningful collaboration, immersive learning, and play.
CONCEPTS
As the institution was engaged in a phase of transition from its first model to a new one, it made sense to share our model concepts based on their distance from the status quo (traditional education). This helped our audience instinctively evaluate how much change they were in for depending on the concept they landed on. We also created flexible containers for our concepts based on the 5 opportunities areas from our insights, such that they could be dialed up or down in each concept. Finally, we broke down the components parts of ALU into distinct blocks such that they could more easily be critiqued in the concepts and also so that our audience could expand their thinking about how the blocks might interact moving forward.
We presented the concepts in a collaborative Miro board that the entire instutition had access to and could play around with. Everyone was encouraged to create their own containers based on the concepts at hand – dial up or down the various opportunity areas, play with the building blocks, expand on various definitions and relationships or create new ones, etc.
We then collated all the containers and distilled further insights about where the institution was collectively leaning, what excited people, what made them fearful, etc. We presented our final recommendations to the institution based on this exercise and the various conversations it enabled.