Who is Moe Hachem?

Before I get started with the blog posts, I’d like to introduce myself.

You can call me Moe.

I am a Lebanese designer and grew up in many different countries and amongst very different cultures. I’m what you might call a third culture kid. Granted you probably can’t call me a kid anymore. My diverse upbringing shaped the way I view and interact with the world.

I studied at the American University of Sharjah in the College of Architecture, Art, and Design. One of the things that caught my eyes with the school was how similar the instruction process was to the ones seen at the Bauhaus.

I am an architect turned visual designer, turned experience designer. I’ve gone through quite a journey to get to the point I’m at right now. People often ask me why I’ve switched career paths, and that’s a fair question to ask me. I don’t see what I’ve done as a career shift, but rather as a natural progression based on my specific interests in design.

I see architecture, graphic, digital and really the entire design field as one highly interrelated field. The basic design principles apply to all of these fields, but they express themselves in different manners. I believe that this is especially true for architecture and user experience design where the design process is almost identical, with the only real difference being the final output.

Profession

While practising as an architect, I had grown fed up and frustrated with how the industry treated architects in the Middle East and North Africa region. The industry treated architects as if they were no more than glorified draftsmen. Architects were also handicapped from the get-go and were rarely allowed to have any real social impact. I wasn’t just an architect though, I was also a freelance visual designer during my off-hours. The combined pay was good (surprisingly), but I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to make a difference, and I refused to allow the professional world to disillusion me.

I didn’t want to let all the spirit built up during my time at university about how design can make a difference in the world go to waste. I wanted to be a socially responsible designer that I always aspired to be. It was easy to give up and say there’s no point to it, but I guess the eternal optimist in me refuses to give up this one point.

So I studied, and I studied a lot. When I was ready to make the jump, I jumped into the world of UX design head first. I began freelancing as a UX designer for a while and eventually found a start-up I was willing to work with full-time.

Currently

I’m the Senior UX and the Customer Experience Designer at Ecomz.

My ultimate goal is to help empower aspiring designers to make a difference in the world we live in. If I can impart just one ounce of knowledge, then I could say my job was well done.

So there you have it, you know more about who I am! Feel free to leave a comment, and do introduce yourself to The Design Blog community!