The impact of the Islamic headscarf (hijab) on employment opportunities in Western contexts has been explored in a number of studies, but there is limited information on the topic as it applies to Islamic mainstream contexts. The current study explores the impact of the hijab on perceptions of employability among South Asian Muslim women in the United States (US) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Perceptions of women that wear hijab (hijabis) and women that do not wear hijab (non-hijabis) were analyzed. Both hijabis and non-hijabis perceived that wearing hijab in the US lowered the chances of applicants receiving a job offer. In the UAE, however, the results were mixed with non-hijabis perceiving that hijab has a negative effect on employability and hijabis perceiving the opposite effect. Implications of the results are discussed.

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Creativity training has been generally based on avoiding critique during idea generation, although benefits of argumentation have been shown during idea selection and elaboration. The research reported here aims to understand how argumentative interactions involving role-play, with subsequent group reflection on them, contribute to collaborative creative design projects. The study was carried within a specialised Masters course at the Royal College of Art (London), organised jointly with Imperial College London, and focuses on analysing group reflection sessions of two groups of students whose on-going project was initially defined as “communication by touch”. Results showed that although students reported difficulties in playing argumentative roles that were not aligned with their personal views, their debates enabled them to arrive at “Eureka!” moments with respect to better grounded and precise definitions of their project concepts. We highlight the complex ways in which emotions circulate with respect to “Eureka!” moments, role-play and grounding. Given differences in ways that groups played out their assigned argumentative roles, we conclude that role play debate and group reflection on it need to be applied and considered as a whole in creative design training.

Design and science collaborations are becoming increasingly common. Yet we have little understanding of how both designers and scientists identify what makes a good collaborative project brief, a phase we call treasure hunting. We conducted two studies with 18 designers and 10 scientists to better understand this mechanism: how do designers generate ideas from laboratories and how scientists perceive these ideas? We found that designers' strategies rely on identifying the uniqueness of the laboratory's research and their long-term vision. We also identified four strategies to ideate from the laboratories' research: finding new application domains, bringing the research to the hands of the end-user, styling and finding new research directions. In the second study, we presented the resulting ideas back to professors and results suggest that initial designers' ideas-sacrificial ideas-can be a powerful tool to support scientists reframing process.