Design as Cultural Translation: An Exploration of Zeinab Zarei’s Work

Imagine a simple rectangular sheet of paper that, through a seemingly magical fold, transforms into a bag, a spatial structure, or even a wearable sculpture. This is where the central question behind Zeinab Zarei’s practice begins: How can a flat surface carry the cultural memory of a society?

Born in 1998 in Isfahan, Iran, Zeinab Zarei is a Dubai-based designer and material researcher with a background in Industrial Design. Her practice explores how folding geometries and material behavior can translate inherited visual languages into contemporary spatial and wearable forms. Working with paper, textiles, leather, and other flexible materials, she develops wearable sculptures, spatial structures, and experimental material systems through bottom-up morphological research. Rather than imposing a predetermined form, she allows it to emerge through the interplay of geometry, material properties, and fabrication processes.

Drawing inspiration from Iranian geometric heritage and Japanese folding traditions, including origami, Zarei does not seek to reproduce these cultural references. Instead, she reinterprets their underlying principles through wearable, sculptural, and spatial objects, incorporating techniques such as folding, kirigami, and furoshiki into her research methodology and design process.

For Zarei, cultural heritage is neither static nor confined to an archive. It is a living system that continues to evolve through contemporary expression. This perspective has shaped her professional trajectory, leading her from Industrial Design toward an exploration of cultural morphology. Her work has received international recognition, including at the International Design Awards (IDA), and she holds a UAE Golden Visa under the arts and culture category.

The roots of this perspective can be traced back to Zarei’s childhood. Her mother, who studied art and traditional crafts, introduced her to observational drawing exercises at the age of six or seven, opening a path toward the works of Reza Abbasi, Kamal al-Din Behzad, and the tradition of Persian miniature painting. Her father, a psychologist whose work left him with limited time to spend with his daughter, introduced her to origami when she was five. After returning from one of his long trips, he gave her a book titled Interesting Paper Shapes, a gift that profoundly transformed the course of her childhood experimentation.

Zarei describes her mother’s influence through a geometric metaphor: “I believe I began as a point, and through my mother’s connection to me, I became a line. A line, after all, has a greater capacity to make an impact.” Her visual heritage came through her mother, while her understanding of structural logic developed through her father. From this perspective, the combination of Iranian geometry and Japanese folding traditions that would later become a defining characteristic of her practice may have been, before a professional choice, a reflection of the emotional and cultural foundations of her childhood.

Studying Industrial Design at Alzahra University brought her dual interest in geometry and art into a professional framework. At the same time, she developed a growing sense of responsibility toward the cultural challenges and questions specific to Iran. Gradually, this personal connection between two visual systems extended beyond individual experience, evolving into a broader inquiry into identity and the state of contemporary Iranian design.

In response to the challenges facing contemporary design in Iran, Zarei sees a comparative approach as a way to move beyond repetition and superficial eclecticism. Looking at the evolution of design in Korea, China, and particularly Japan, she observes how traditional visual languages in these cultures have gradually developed into contemporary design expressions that retain a sense of historical continuity while embracing modernity. In her view, Iranian design has yet to establish an equally coherent contemporary language.

For this reason, Japan has become one of the central subjects of her research. What processes have allowed cultural heritage to remain an active force in contemporary Japanese design? And could studying this experience offer valuable perspectives for rethinking Iranian design? Zarei prefers the term Iranian design over Islamic design, understanding this identity as the product of the Iranian cultural imagination’s historical encounters with both internal and external influences.

Among her sources of inspiration is Keyvan Khosrovani, whose work during the Pahlavi era demonstrates how traditional Iranian techniques can coexist with a contemporary design language. Here, her comparative approach finds a clearer direction: the aim is not to reproduce traditional motifs at a superficial level, but to explore how tradition can become a living structural principle within contemporary design.

Along this line of inquiry, an old Persian verse takes on renewed meaning:

“How can one who has not received existence from its source become a giver of existence?”

The legitimacy of a new visual language lies not only in the authenticity of its sources, but also in the integrity and meaningfulness of the process through which those sources are transformed into form.

A closer examination of Zarei’s work reveals a consistent underlying logic: a two-dimensional surface becomes a three-dimensional form through the interaction of geometry, material, and behavior. In these works, the surface is never a neutral substrate. Proportions, axes, cuts, and folds respond to material properties such as weight, flexibility, and texture, allowing volume and function to emerge from these interactions.

The eyeglass case offers a clear example of this principle. A flat rectangle transforms into a three-dimensional object through a slight application of pressure, drawing on the principles of furoshiki, the Japanese tradition of cloth wrapping. Two internal layers prevent the temples of the glasses from coming into contact with the lenses, addressing the risk of scratches. This can be understood as function emerging from geometry, where practical performance arises directly from the structural logic of the object.

The shoulder bag introduces the human desire for variety into the design process. Based on a single silhouette inspired by the envelope, known in Japanese as tegami, and the principles of furoshiki, the bag can be folded into four sizes and five distinct configurations. Through this adaptability, the project seeks to respond formally to the human desire to change and reinterpret everyday surroundings and objects, even at the scale of a handbag.

In the backpack project, the same approach extends to the relationship between the body, movement, sustainability, and adaptability. The objective was to develop a functional structure through a bottom-up research process. The number of sewn components was reduced from approximately 170 in conventional backpacks to 67, the pockets were designed to remain inaccessible from the outside while the bag is being carried, and the internal volume can be adjusted. These decisions demonstrate how formal logic can directly support reduced production complexity, security, and functional efficiency. Inspiration drawn from the folding structure of the Japanese Hercules beetle was translated into the backpack’s folding mechanism.

In the folding garment project, Zarei’s comparative approach reaches both its most developed expression and a point of critical uncertainty. The work begins with an examination of Persian miniature painting, illustrations from the Shahnameh, traditional tilework, and Japanese folding traditions. Rather than directly copying or reproducing these references, however, it asks how inherited visual knowledge might be translated into a contemporary material language. The process begins with geometric research and paper-folding experiments, eventually leading to a flexible structure situated somewhere between garment, sculpture, and spatial form.

The garment’s deep blue simultaneously evokes Persian lapis lazuli and ai-iro (藍色), the indigo blue associated with Japan’s aizome dyeing tradition, establishing a visual dialogue between two cultural landscapes. Zarei’s intention is not to present heritage as decoration or nostalgia. Here, geometry becomes a living carrier of memory, shaping the garment’s final form through construction, movement, and material transformation. The garment was constructed by Zahra Aminolraya in Isfahan, while the project was photographed by Rokhsareh Okhovat in Dubai.

The overall silhouette was developed through the selection and simplification of elements from several traditional Japanese garments, including the hakama, yukata, and kimono, bringing their principal lines into closer dialogue with Iranian dress. Certain forms of the Japanese hakama, particularly those associated with martial and samurai traditions, have a divided, trouser-like construction. In this project, that structure was modified and combined with a skirt to provide greater freedom of movement and comfort while retaining its visual character.

The result is a wearable sculpture that is neither a direct reconstruction of the traditional clothing of either culture nor a rootless fantasy. Instead, it attempts to establish a new visual language in which neither tradition is entirely dominant or absent.

Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether the two cultures historically attached similar meanings or emotional associations to this particular shade of blue, or whether the connection is primarily the designer’s personal interpretation of two visual traditions. This ambiguity does not diminish the work’s aesthetic value. Rather, it reveals the boundary between comparative analysis and artistic intuition, a boundary from which much of the work’s poetic strength may emerge.

Considered together, these projects reveal a recurring relationship between functional needs, structural logic, and form: from adaptability and protection to component reduction, sustainability, and the evolution of form through comparative research.

Yet behind this research-driven trajectory lies a difficult professional experience whose effects continue to resonate with Zarei. During a collaboration with a prominent jewellery brand, she designed a multi-piece collection inspired by the Sasanian period. According to Zarei, despite contractual agreements, her name was not included in the official credits, her share of sales revenue was not paid in full, and her contribution to the development of the concept was diminished in the brand’s official narrative. She describes the experience as the loss of a year of her life, with consequences extending beyond financial harm to her professional identity and emotional well-being.

This experience raises broader questions about the absence of sufficiently fair and effective institutional protections within Iran’s design industry. Issues of authorship, intellectual property rights, and the professional recognition of designers extend beyond an individual dispute and call for a more comprehensive examination of the structures governing design practice. These conditions may place Zarei and many of her peers in situations where unequal power relations and commercial interests leave their contributions unrecognized and their voices unheard.

Zarei does not regard her mission as a designer as an exclusively individual pursuit. Her seven-year involvement withCubic Design Podcast, which originated within a university student scientific association through the initiative of Kimia Ansari, reflects this commitment. Following its university beginnings, Cubic shifted its focus toward examining designers’ lived professional experiences and the realities of design practice, gradually developing into an independent media platform. Her involvement demonstrates a desire to share knowledge and cultivate collective discourse beyond the production of individual works. Together with her professional experiences in Iran and her subsequent migration, this editorial practice has connected her design trajectory to a broader social context.

The same commitment to sharing knowledge and experience is evident in her educational workshops. In these settings, folding moves beyond a technique for producing form and becomes a tool for designing experiences, transferring knowledge, and encouraging collective interaction. The objective is not simply to teach a technique, but to engage participants with the underlying logic of form generation and demonstrate how folding systems can reinterpret and redefine different cultural references.

Zarei has explored this approach through workshops including a Kusudama Folding Workshop at Studio 13 in Alserkal Avenue, and a workshop organized by Diarbid Gallery in collaboration with Dubai Culture at Al Shindagha Museum in 2026. Her earlier activities also included workshops on architectural folding, design thinking, and folding techniques in 2024. Across these experiences, the relationship between geometry, material, and culture that defines her design projects moves from an individual process of making into a shared, participatory experience.

Zarei’s body of work can be understood as an ongoing experiment in understanding and developing different visual systems. Her particular focus on Iranian and Japanese cultural traditions, explored through material and geometry, has provided a foundation for this investigation. What distinguishes her formal language is the integration of cultural research with structural logic, material behavior, and function.

This approach has gradually expanded her professional practice beyond the functional boundaries of product design, opening possibilities for experimentation across different scales and disciplines. At the same time, her reliance on an Iranian–Japanese comparative framework, and the fluid boundary between cultural analysis and poetic interpretation, leave considerable room for further exploration.

Perhaps it is precisely this fluid boundary that defines an essential dimension of her cultural design identity: a space where culture is neither reconstructed nor merely referenced, but continuously reinterpreted through making, material, and form.