Ayssar Arida TLDR;
I’m a designer & lateral thinker with a playful 20+ years career juggling digital and physical products in many scales, dimensions and media: toys, video games, 2D & 3D creative apps, ed-tech platforms, commercial skyscrapers, residential communities and urban playgrounds… in agency, academia and startup settings. If I’m not hacking away at my laptop or my toys, you’ll likely find me walking on a beach somewhere… 🐚🚶🏻♂️
Anti-silos by nature, I like to connect ideas, people, and things - including toys - and to find unexpected solutions on the bridges in-between.
I spent 20+ playful years running my design, dev and research practice between Europe and the MENA, while writing and speaking on design education, cross-disciplinarity and urbanity, identity and diversity, producing a few publications, and collecting a few accolades.
An eternal optimist, one day I decided to stop designing houses for the rich and sometimes infamous and start designing dollhouses for my two girls. A family affair that lead me down the rabbit hole of startup life, with a great team.
Raised VC funding, went through the accelerators, completed the pivots, launched, grew, rode through an entire country imploding around us, and crashed at the edge of the runway when the first lockdown froze everyone's wings.
A billion ideas, decks, pitches, brands built, toys manufactured, partnerships signed, traction, mistakes, design iterations, lines of code, successes and failures and lessons learned!
Now it's time to share :)
- ayssar
Contact
Toolbox
- most current (and some legacy) apps for 2D and 3D design and rendering and CAD
- most modern web dev and product management tools
- any APIs, in particular generative AI (OpenAi, StabilityAi, etc)
- Favorite goto’s: VS Code, react-three-fiber/drei, SketchUp, Fusion 360, Pen & Paper