Yasmin Barakat

I designed the marketplace and ran it through the festival — my concept selected and built. The idea: build the whole structure from used pallets, so sustainability is legible in the architecture itself. Safety regulations ruled pallets out as structure — so the idea adapted instead of dying: the built architecture echoes the pallet language, and the real pallets became modular pieces at every shopfront, which vendors made their own — displaying product outside and in.

Around it, a lively gathering space: a central stage programmed for vendor activations, fourteen sustainability-led vendors, and the Tanweer Pop-up, a concept store I curated from local and international brands. The materials carried the story further — deadstock fabric became the cushion covers, and upcycled merchandise was made with an Emirati label.

Brand world-building at production speed. I introduced AI into the label’s ways of working — from tool selection to an in-house content pipeline — and developed the team’s prompt craft so the capability lives inside the company, not with a vendor. The result: faster production at lower cost, with creative control kept in-house. For the Inanna Reborn website, that pipeline translated a heritage-rooted identity into one coherent visual world across five looks.

End-to-end programme leadership, from brief to wardrobe in service. I led the uniform programme for Bait Elowal through the full arc: a broad design study of thirty-seven looks presented for approval, and an approved teal two-piece with a placket pattern drawn from the brand identity, now produced and worn on the floor. In parallel, I contributed to curating the concept stores, including the library.

Strategic-foresight research into how the creative, gaming and software industries converge into one transmedia ecosystem — and what that means for learning. Across a 95-page study, our team of four mapped the actors and their links, traced each technological enabler — AI, AR and VR, blockchain, cloud, mobile learning — along its own temporal roadmap, and ran the system through a full STEEPV analysis, from social shifts to political forces.

The whole system then had to fit on one poster. We drew the ecosystem as a living organism: industries as soil and trunk, technologies as nutrients, developers as bees, consumers as ants, governance as the sun — an early habit of making complex systems legible that still shapes how I present strategy today. Research conducted with three colleagues in the strategic-foresight programme of Dr. Prof. Ingo Rollwagen, AMD Fresenius.