- MTRNM
- &KILN
- Dukkan Collective
- Fanan (UX/UI Case Study)
- City Snippets
- Sufism
- An Ode to Amman
- On Home/عن البيت
- Bouba/Kiki
- Etel @ MoMA
- Copyquette
- Spread by Fig Tree
- Makhtoum
- ADW/P27
✦ Photography
✦ Misc. Work
Resume
Apparel Design, Textile Design, Branding/Identity. Research, Graphic Design
Basem Tash - Designer
Lai Xu - Mentor
Lilan Yang - Mentor
The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. In a test used to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily, American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India labelled the more curved, round shape "bouba" and the sharp-edged counterpart as "kiki" when given the two options.
At the beginning of this project, I intended to recreate the original bouba/kiki test and collect data on a list of nonsense words from my friends. That all changed when I opened TikTok and saw a video about the bouba/kiki effect in relation to humans. The woman in the video was saying how she "only dates bouba men" which she defines as those with softer, less defined facial and physical features. Intrigued by this whole idea and wanting to take it a step further, I conducted my own test around how the bouba/kiki effect can be used to categorize people. More specifically, I wanted to apply this to a set of individuals that are widely recognized by the public with polarised opinions about them: celebrities.