“My name is Abdullah Miller. I’m an architect and designer and founder of Million Home Studio.
When thinking about design, there’s always a message or a feeling that I want to convey through the designs. I try to think of other elements, like the texture of the material, the echoes of sound that it could make, try to tackle different senses of the human being to deliver this message.
And one of my favorite projects is designed in going to a digital museum. I was asked to design an experience that would relate to Zion and going deep. I was thinking of the human experience and how can it implement. The theme that I chose for these two leaders was the unity. That’s why I called it the Dome Unity, and I used the idea of light and sound.
So as you enter the pavilion, you start to see lights that are uniformly into one spot, and then you start to hear the voice in the background. On the day of uniting the nations in end and whether or not we will live to give you know, it was a year before the pandemic. My work was relying heavily on art installation and exhibitions to show people the work that I do.
The daily life of me as a designer was me coming to the office, talking to the team, discussing the projects that we have after the lockdown. This ability to communicate in this certain way was taken away. It took that human bouncing off idea interaction that we used to have. But I started doing other activities, having walks outside, exploring, which connected me more to nature.
And that’s where I found ability to get inspired again. Nature allows us to understand being adaptive to our environment, being agile, the way the respond to their context is very intriguing, and this is something that I could definitely implement in my designs after the pandemic. Exhibitions were taken away, so as a way for me to re-implement my art installations into different designs.
I started implementing them in interior design.
This way it allowed me to create more permanent projects. So in a way, being agile and taking this pandemic situation into my advantage of having more permanent pieces that goes into commercial spaces. If there’s anything since I was a kid, I ask a lot of questions. It’s what I live by because I think we as humans, we need to have that curiosity.
We need to understand where we’re living, our context, what we’re doing on daily lives and why are we doing it. And I think answering these questions helped me in designing, but also helped me in understanding life.”