Styles

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up if you will ever dig.
- Marcus Aurelius

Builders of systems

Najjar means carpenter in Lebanese, the original form of a builder.

That meaning feels poetic because in 1994 in Montreal, Canada, I was born into the Najjar lineage, within a family whose story helped shape both physical and digital landscapes across the Middle East. My grandfather, Fouad Najjar, established the East and West mini department stores in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, developing one of the first concepts where everything you would normally find in an over-the-counter or streetside shop could be sold under one roof. When my father was six years old, MEA Flight #444 crashed and Fouad was lost to the waters of the Arabian Gulf. My grandmother later remarried Abdullah Tariki, who became another strong role model in our family. Tariki was the first Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia, the first Saudi to sit on the board of Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, and co-founder of OEPC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Tariki later mentored my father, who initially studied chemical engineering before following his passion for technology and founding Nesma Internet in 1998 under the Nesma conglomerate. He helped bring Saudi Arabia online during the early rise of the internet era, growing the company into one of the largest Internet Service Providers in the Kingdom and serving as CEO across Nesma’s telecom and technology ventures for over two decades. The generations before me were builders who pioneered systems that shaped how people lived and connected. Their legacies taught me that ordinary people could make extraordinary waves and made me wonder where I might uniquely contribute.

Long before I had language for it, I was already drawn to the invisible forces beneath how people live, connect, and move through cities. Raised in Saudi Arabia, I attended the American International School in Riyadh from elementary through high school. I traveled widely from India to Morocco and spent summers visiting relatives scattered across the globe from Beirut to Cairo and London to Dubai. Over the course of my three decades of life, I have experienced juxtaposing versions of myself, from Saudi-Reem to Miami-Reem. With reflection, I discovered that my passion lies in enhancing the experiences humans have with their environments, from physical to digital, because I have seen firsthand how settings and systems profoundly affect our well-being. They shape who we are, who we become, and the lives we are able to build.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.
- Jane Jacobs

Understanding environments

In 2012, just before I turned eighteen, I left home and moved to Florida to study Architecture at the University of Miami. At the time, the school was led by Dean Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, co-founder of the New Urbanism movement, an approach to city planning that promotes walkable, mixed-use, human-scaled neighborhoods designed to foster community. Under her leadership, I was trained to think about cities not simply as collections of structures and spaces, but as environments designed for human connection.

Having grown up between East and West, I understood how society shapes the way people use space, a perspective that surfaced in my work. During architectural reviews, Plater-Zyberk frequently emphasized what she called “the life between buildings.” It was never just about form or function, but about how those environments shape how people gather, interact, and experience the world. I began to see cities not as static lines drawn on paper, but as dynamic environments shaped by culture, movement, and human behavior. That realization planted the first seeds of a theory that cities are not just plans we design, but living environments we must learn to understand.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture, and an additional major in Economics I felt was necessary to understand the forces shaping our world, I moved to Dallas, Texas in 2017 for my first professional role at LRK. There I spearheaded Architectural Design for my first 'real-world' project, The Salty Donut Coffee Shop in Dallas’s Bishop Arts District. This project had a special place in my heart for three reasons. First, its co-founder Amanda Pizarro-Rodriguez who I genuinely enjoyed collaborating with had developed the concept during her own time at the University of Miami. Second, the Dallas location marked the brand’s first expansion beyond its Miami roots, mirroring my own move at the time. Third, coffee shops have always been my favorite third space. Watching the project evolve from concept to construction showed me that ideas are not simply abstract. They can manifest into tangible forms and shape how people move, feel, and interact with the world. Design has the power to shape the human experience, and it left me wondering how we might use that superpower for good.

Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with the humanities that yields the results that make our hearts sing.
- John Maeda

Designing for a digital world

After investing eight years studying and practicing the art and science of architecture, I wanted to layer in my lifelong curiosity for technology. Growing up my favorite game was The Sims. Not playing with the characters but using the motherlode cheat code to keep adding money so I could the build spaces and places the Sims could inhabit. That was my game. It was no surprise that 3D modeling became my favorite part of architecture as I have always enjoyed designing and visualizing environments before they existed. My curiosities put me down a path to explore how digital experiences could further shape our environments, which eventually led me to User Experience Design. 'UX' had only emerged as a discipline in the early 2000s, but Apple helped demonstrate its power. Steve Jobs showed the world that great user experience could become a company’s biggest competitive advantage. While he not invent UX, he made the world care about it.

The first article I published was for the UX Collective where I explored the parallels between architecture and UX. Both disciplines shape how people move through the world. Architecture considers circulation, scale, and spatial behavior. UX considers navigation, interaction, and user flow. At their core, both fields design environments people inhabit. One physical, one digital. I began to see Product Managers as Real Estate Developers and Software Engineers as General Contractors. The same song, played in different keys.

‍In January of 2020 I took a risk and left my stable architectural design job to enroll in a UX Design program at SMU so I could explore how design moves from schematics to specifications in the world of technology. At the time, I had no idea that two weeks later the world would shut down. When the COVID pandemic hit hiring froze overnight and my path forward suddenly became uncertain so I decided to spend that spring and summer doubling down on learning. I completed a course in Smart Cities from the MIT Media Lab, one in Strategic Management from Wharton, and applied to every entry level UX role I could find on LinkedIn. I also put all my eggs in one basket with a single graduate school application to my dream program at the University of Southern California.

To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science.
- Leonardo Da Vinci

Cross-disciplinary thinking

Jimmy Iovine and Andre “Dr. Dre” Young built Beats at the intersection of culture, design, business, and technology before selling the company to Apple. In the process they realized how rare it was to find people who could move fluidly across all three disciplines. Too often people understood business and technology but not design, or design and business but not technology. They believed innovation in this new age required all three. That realization led them to found the Iovine and Young Academy at the University of Southern California built around that intersection. In 2020, three years after the school launched its first graduate degree, I joined the 10th cohort of the Master of Science in Integrated Design, Business, and Technology.

This program gave me the opportunity to collaborate with students from a wide range of disciplines on interdisciplinary projects. I worked on innovative projects from a contract to design digital experiences for Harvard Business Publishing that transformed traditional business case studies into gamified products, to exploring the future of retail stores for GameStop’s Director of New Formats. The experience reinforced that the most interesting ideas rarely emerge from a single discipline, they emerge at the intersection of many.

In my favorite class about speculative storytelling and strategic foresight we learned frameworks used by futurists, strategic forecast professionals who analyze data, technology, and trends to identify potential scenarios to help organizations prepare for them. The Four Futures framework imagines an industry across four scenarios of growth, collapse, constraint, and transformation. The Futures Cone method places these possibilities across timelines from the present baseline to near-term signals, mid-term structural shifts, and long term civilization changes. I explored housing and urban living, first expanding development through technology, then collapsing the market under economic and environmental pressures, before becoming constrained as scarcity reshaped ownership and density.

I imagined a future split between dense technologically advanced corporate controlled urban infrastructure and simpler natural communities inspired by what Neri Oxman calls 'material ecology' with her biologically inspired Silk Pavilion. This built on the theory that I was developing that cities behave less like static machines and more like living organisms and systems, adapting to technology, environment, and human behavior.

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
- Buckminster Fuller

Technology bringing cities to life

Shortly after I moved to New York City in the fall of 2021, crossing off a bucket list item made possible by the remote work digital nomad life many tech roles enabled after the pandemic, I received an offer to join Oracle’s Local Government team as a UX Design Lead within its Public Safety Suite in the spring of 2022. At the time the business unit was only about a year into building the platform and no products had gone live yet. It functioned like a startup within a larger corporation, which made it an exciting place to build and iterate, learning by wearing multiple hats while still receiving resources from one of the largest software companies in the world. I spearheaded design for the first product to go live, and just like with the Salty Donut project it reinforced something I had begun to understand earlier in my career. Ideas and designs are not just dreams, they can quickly move from concept to creation and have real-world impact.

Larry Ellison founded Oracle in the late 1970s after working on a database project inspired by research for the CIA called 'Oracle.' The idea was simple but powerful, organize massive amounts of information securely so organizations could make better decisions. Decades later that philosophy still shapes Oracle’s public safety strategy, helping make first responders lives not just simpler but vastly more productive so they can build trust with the communities they serve. In the fall of 2025 I gave a presentation on our ‘Northstar’ vision on Campus Safety to Wim Coekaerts, who led Linux at Oracle and now leads our industry unit, and began to see that leadership also understood the importance of cross-disciplinary thinking. He recognized that the future sits at the intersection of public safety, healthcare, digital infrastructure, and the smart city ecosystem. Linux itself is an open source operating system that powers much of the world’s computing infrastructure and a reminder that some of the most important digital foundations in the world are built collaboratively. Four years since I joined I have developed a deep understanding for the role technology plays in shaping how cities function and how communities experience safety and well being in their environment.

‍The year 2026 feels like an inflection point. Artificial Intelligence is moving from experimental hype and deeply integrating across nearly every layer of society, economy, and governance, beginning to converge with biology, advanced computation, and the infrastructure that shapes our world. This reinforces that cities are not just places I once designed in architecture, but are dynamic ecosystems that constantly sense, learn, evolve, and respond.

You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. - Steve Jobs

Smart cities as living organisms

Working in 'Big Tech,' I realized I was in the right place to understand the large scale impact technology could have on the built environment, adding another layer to the stack of knowledge I had been building since architecture. I had a unique vantage point on the theory I was developing that advanced and complex systems mimic how life and biological systems themselves are organized.

Using Oracle as an example, their JavaScript Extension Toolkit 'JET' functions like a neural interface where applications are built. The Public Safety Suite 'OPSS' sits above it like a brain coordinating decisions and responses. Underneath, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 'OCI' acts like a nervous system transmitting signals across the network. Internal products like Oracle Spatial provide situational awareness, Analytics 'OAC' enables pattern recognition and insight across complex data, Digital Evidence Management serves as institutional memory, and Wearable Computer Systems function like human senses feeding information into the platform. As humans adapt and evolve, so does technology, and new initiatives continue to expand the stack, such as Oracle’s digital ambulance which acts like a life support circulatory system within a city. Together these layers resemble a digital organism: a unified secure internal platform or “body” capable of integrating with an ever evolving external ecosystem or “environment” of smart city technologies, from drones to ground sensors.

‍Today, I live in Austin, Texas, the 5th city I have called home, and often return to Istanbul, Turkey, where my family lives today. Through relatableDreamstate I plan to share insights gathered from the places I have been, the mentors I have learned from, and the environments I have had the privilege of helping design. I hope to shed light on how we can prioritize the human experience in a world where technology, biology, computing, and infrastructure are converging. My experiences and multidisciplinary career across design and technology have been a journey toward understanding how to build in ways that put humans first. In many ways, it feels like a continuation of a narrative that began generations before me, designing systems that shape how people connect and ultimately live. This blog will be very Reem-coded, written from coffee shops around the world and layered with my interests from philosophy to smart city technology. I believe writing is one of the best ways to explore our internal worlds and a way to question and better understand the forces shaping the external one.

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
- Epictetus

I promise to stay curious.
See you at blog #2.