ayah bdeir

A reinterpretation of a traditional chandelier in which the crystals and lights form the underlying rigid structure for transient, flowing arms. The disappearing and reappearing body of the chandelier is defined by a fabric contour which weaves through a channel of suspended hoops. The system is actuated by a single driving motor unwinding a spool of custom ribbon. The speed of the motor is calibrated to match the prescribed pattern of the ribbon and define the timing of the piece. The effect is an ethereal lighting fixture which continuously draws and erases itself, in essence, a 4D chandelier.

Ayah Bdeir and Jessica Banks
Chandelier in 4, 2008
Custom electronics, lights, crystals, ribbon, wire, perspex

More pictures here

littleBits is a library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together.

littleBits website

littleBits intro from ayah bdeir on Vimeo.

Research around the idea of creating an open source model for hardware and design.

An interactive multitouch blackboard aiming to make the specificities of the arabic language a fun activity for kids.

‘we are middle’ (WAM) is a group of designers, artists, and engineers who are looking to create, curate and publish works, articles, images and thoughts, which contrary to popular media and politics, represent the common in the Middle East rather than difference. We wish to examine and play with new representations of our Middle East through selected themes in which seriousness and humor are each other’s undertones. The themes will be open to contribution from creative makers from around the world.

Discriminatory references in the media used to be a fairly common practice, particularly in American cartoons of the early twentieth century. African Americans, Jews, Asians, Arabs were either “the bad guy” or were simply gratuitously made fun of, ridiculed, or misrepresented. Subsequently, many groups and lobbies have made efforts to put an end to such portrayal of racist attitudes, and procedures were put in place to increase sensitivity in the definition of cartoons. This, however, didn’t always apply to the portrayal of Arabs.

That’s all Sheikh is a research paper that looks at the discrepancies in the way producers and distributors of cartoons dealt with discriminatory images of Arabs versus those of other ethnic groups; discrepancies that can be viewed as a diagnosis of deeper issues in Arab-American relations.

VoG is a voice over IP application developed as a final project for the BEng in Computer and Communication Engineering (with Rouba Khalil and Christian Khoury). The application employs a network that is not traditionally used for voice, General Packet Radio Service and attempts tp utilize the available bandwidth in GPRS to enhance communication in underprivileged communities. VoG uses a low cost network infrastructure and provides IP telephony services for countries where alternate communication networks are either very costly (GSM) or very inefficient (internet).

In wireless signal transmission, adaptive transmission was shown to yield significant benefits. A matlab program simulates the improvement introduced by adaptive PSAM scheme that is further improved if power and rate are jointly adapted to the quality of the channel measurement at the receiver, rather than to the quality of the channel.

paper