"DMI was a window into what the world could become — and I was not a bystander."
Designer. Educator. Pakistan's first Autism self-advocate. MIT Media Lab researcher. Fulbright scholar. Book co-author. UN speaker. Now professor at Al Akhawayn University in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco — and just getting started.
📎 SEE FULL PROFILESome people inherit money. Fazli Azeem inherited fonts. His paternal grandfather, Fazli Khalil, founded the Karachi Type Foundry — Pakistan's first — in the 1950s, training the inaugural generation of graphic designers and introducing offset printing to East and West Pakistan. The ink, you might say, was already in his blood.
Growing up in Karachi, Fazli won art prizes at the prestigious Karachi Grammar School and trained in fine arts and sculpting at the national school of art. But it was the diagnosis that changed everything: in 2006, as an adult, he was identified as being on the Autism spectrum (Asperger's Syndrome). Rather than retreating, he stepped forward — becoming Pakistan's first, and South Asia's only, self-advocate for the Autism Spectrum.
Then came the Fulbright. In 2012, Fazli landed in Boston to pursue his MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, with electives at the MIT Media Lab under Prof. Mitchel Resnick — creator of SCRATCH and LEGO Mindstorms — a man whose own intellectual lineage traces back to Seymour Papert and Jean Piaget. Fazli was learning design from the source.
His thesis project, Inclusive Interfaces, was incubated at the Harvard Innovation Lab, reached the semi-finals of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, featured at TEDxBeaconStreet, and was exhibited at the US Department of Education's Datapalooza on invitation from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
"DMI was a window into what the world could become, and I was not a bystander, I was part of the process of creating the future, through design research, user experiences, interactions and prototypes."— Qazi Fazli Azeem, MFA '14, Dynamic Media Institute
"I am living successfully because I never resigned to fate and dealt everything with courage. This is the reason fortune favoured me always."— Qazi Fazli Azeem
Published in the UK by Jessica Kingsley Press and available on Amazon, this book brought together leading Autism self-advocates from around the world. Among them: Dr Temple Grandin (whose mother Fazli met at a Florida conference), Dr Stephen Mark Shore, and Qazi Fazli Azeem himself — the only contributor from South Asia and the Islamic world.
It was edited by acclaimed British psychologist Dr Tony Attwood. Fazli wrote it while still completing his Fulbright MFA in Boston — because apparently doing an MFA at MIT Media Lab and writing a book simultaneously wasn't quite enough on his plate.
📖 VIEW ON AMAZON"Professional networks tell you what someone has done. YesPress tells you who they are."— YesPress