Do We Really Need a SyriaHub?
The Birth of an Idea
Ideas are like infants, or like star formation: abstract and fragile. There is nothing special about having an idea in itself; what matters is how it is nurtured, and why it exists in the first place. It exists to serve a purpose, no doubt, but it also has a story. This article is about the birth of SyriaHub.
More than a year ago, while preparing a series of lectures on Data-Driven Design with a colleague, we had our first spark around data and its importance in shaping decisions, whether in design or beyond. It was a small seed, an inception, watered and nurtured through discussions with other colleagues who held similar ideas, each expressed through different manifestations (or iterations, as I prefer to call them).
But how does one translate an idea? How do you unlock its mysticism? An idea is like language: highly symbolic, heavily loaded. How, then, does one decode such an abstraction?
When Context Shifts
As we were developing those lectures, something shifted, outside the expectations, or comprehension, of anyone for that matter. Syria entered a new era, one not defined by resolution, but by possibility.
What followed was not clarity, but noise, an expected noise nonetheless. Reports, opinions, images, initiatives, claims, counterclaims. An abundance of information, arriving faster than it could be understood.
It became clear that the problem was no longer access to data, but orientation within it.
From Framework to Reality
Quietly, almost unintentionally, we realised that the structure of the lecture we were building, how data informs decisions, how evidence supports claims, how assumptions must be exposed before action, mapped onto Syria with unsettling precision.