The Fourth Voice
FATEMA ALMALOOD
WRITING & SPEAKING
Documenting a region while helping build it
I work on the research side of this field as well as the practice side. Writing the survey forces the question that design work lets you avoid: whether any of this actually works, rather than only whether it looks good.
PUBLISHED
In print
BOOK CHAPTER · 2023
Routledge
Origin of interactive science centers and the status of science centers in the Middle East
A chapter in Amplifying Informal Science Learning: Rethinking Research, Design, and Engagement, edited by Judy Diamond and Sherman Rosenfeld (Routledge, 2023) — a survey of where interactive science centres came from and where the field now stands in the Middle East, written while I was working inside it.
SUBJECTS
What I talk and write about
Three subjects I can speak on without notes, to a room of museum, science centre, zoo, aquarium, park or attraction people.
What free-choice learning environments know about changing behaviour
Our sector has spent a century on the problem the technology industry has just discovered: how to change what someone understands or does when they can walk away at any moment and you will never reach them again. Attracting power, holding power, satiation, and why attention you did not earn tells you nothing.
The Gulf's build-out, and the turn toward sustainability mandates
The region built a significant informal learning infrastructure in about two decades, and several of those institutions have since been reoriented around sustainability goals — the same shift many Western institutions are being asked to make, arriving from a different direction. I speak to this as a designer who worked there and as the published researcher on the region.
AVAILABLE FOR
Sessions, webinars and features
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Conference sessions and panels
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Webinars and online programmes
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Trade features and commissioned articles
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Guest lectures and studio critiques
Designing for an audience with no shared starting point
No majority audience, no common curriculum, no set of references you can build a label around. What that does to how you write text, sequence a gallery and pitch a sustainability message — and why it is a different skill from cultural sensitivity training.
FATEMA ALMALOOD
Experience Designer
BIOGRAPHY
Fatema Almalood is an interpretation and experience designer working across free-choice learning environments. She began as a design specialist on the floor of the Bahrain Science Centre and was promoted to interior architect at MTE Studios in Dubai, where she worked on the Dubai Frame Experience galleries, the Bahrain Science Centre and the Dubai Transport Museum, and developed the attraction display designs for Dubai Municipality's Quranic Park. She holds an MA in Design Management and Communications and is a chapter author in Amplifying Informal Science Learning (Diamond & Rosenfeld, Routledge, 2023), writing on the origins of interactive science centres and the status of science centres in the Middle East. She practises as The Fourth Voice, from Tampa, Florida.
COMMISSIONS AND BOOKINGS
If you are programming a session or commissioning a feature
Tell me the audience and the gap in the schedule and I will shape something to fit it, or say honestly that someone else is a better fit.