Hello everyone,
My name is Joanne Hayek. I’m a multidisciplinary designer, educator, and entrepreneur based in Dubai, where I teach at the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (DIDI), and am the co-founder of Ibdå, an R&D consultancy aiming to enable and fast-track impact-driven innovation across sectors. Initially trained as an architect, my work spans across fields and scales: urban planning, fashion, digital design, and programming. Over the years, through my practice and research, I’ve been drawn to exploring how design, technology, and collaboration can act as agents of systemic change: from developing sustainable materials and social enterprises to prototyping new models for innovation and collective action.
My PhD research explores how AI can amplify collective intelligence, helping people and organizations work together in new ways to address complex challenges. Through the design of collaborative systems that merge human and machine cognition, the research aims to develop open, distributed models of innovation that are more inclusive, adaptive, and capable of generating long-term social and environmental impact.
In relation to this week’s discussion on research philosophy, my research seems to fall between post-positivist and constructivist approaches. It draws on the idea that systems can be empirically observed and modeled, yet it also challenges the notion that knowledge can ever be entirely objective. If knowledge is constantly co-created through interactions between humans, technologies, and environments, then what does it mean to “know” within a distributed system? This perspective assumes that intelligence is not centralized but relational—an evolving network shaped by both human and non-human agents. Reflecting on these ontological and epistemological questions pushes me to reconsider how collective intelligence actually produces meaning, and whether AI is expanding or constraining the ways in which knowledge is formed, validated, and acted upon.