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

    THE CULTURAL ENCYCLOPEDIA
    ANO

    The cultural encyclopaedia, a project by ANO, is a re/ordering of knowledge, narratives and representations from and about the African continent through the celebration of its indigenous knowledge systems. My collaborator and I teamed up to help the ANO team organize the content they had been gathering into an open-source platform that would allow other countries to engage in a similar exercise. Over the span of two years, ANO fellows under the leadership of Nana Oforiatta Ayim traveled all regions in Ghana documenting its indigenous knowledge systems. They produced this first version of the Cultural Encyclopaedia which they felt didn’t capture the breadth and depth of the indiginous knowledge systems they had documented. 





    PROCESS

    We first looked how the content written by fellows was being developed and realized three needs: 

    1. Consistency in writing of entries
    2. A better tagging system for entries
    3. Opportunities for new media to bring life to their collection of entries.

    We developed several writing guides to help the fellows in their entry writing process, which they used to revamp the content throughout the encyclopaedia. 

    As we worked, it became clear that the encyclopaedia needed a consistent and non-Western taxonomy that its audience would resonate with, but also that would make it easier to order content in the long term. Finding a taxonomy that more closely matched the indiginous knowledge systems fellows were documenting was an incredibly rewarding task. We designed a series of workshops to distill this taxonomy using a bottom up approach: what were common threads between entries and how could those be used to suggest this new taxonomy. We landed with the following taxonomy:

    • Being: entries about how humans relate to themselves and the world
    • Expression: entries about humans manifest their inner worlds
    • Communication: entries about humans circulate informations within their worlds
    • Technology: entries about how humans alter the natural world
    • Environment: entries about the natural world and how humans relate to it
    • Power: entries about how humans govern themselves in the world
    • Cycles: entries about humans mark and interact with the passage of time


    ARCHIVE DESIGN

    We finally created a web platform using Notion to host all the entries for Ghana which can be found here. We then held a workshop with fellows to review the archiving platform and suggest changes. 

    The cultural encyclopedia can be accessed here.