Professor Sabet is a design educator and practitioner with many years of architecture and interior design teaching experience in the United States and the Middle East, and a licensed and a registered architect in the State of New York. He received his Master's Degree in Architecture from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Va. in 1978, and BFA in Environmental Design/Interior Design from Parsons School of Design and the New School for Social Research, New York in 1976.
For the past eight years, he has been teaching at the Zayed University, College of Arts and Creative Enterprises, an all-girls higher education institution. Prior to his ZU experience, he taught architecture, interior design, and Foundations at the American University of Sharjah for fourteen years. In both institutions, he had the privilege of collaboration with numerous academic and professional entities, and participated in various community services and scholarly activities. He had the opportunity to teach independently and collaboratively (inter and cross disciplinary studios), advised students to meet their academic goals, and met with their parents to discuss and resolve students’ academic and personal challenges. He has effectively engaged in healthy discourse with faculty and design community on variety of design pedagogy and practice issues. Throughout the years of successful teaching, he has instructed design studios ranging from elements of design in the Foundations level, through design principles and technology in the mid-years, to comprehensive and senior thesis design studios the in upper years. To further augment the studio courses, he has taught technical and elective courses in both architecture and interior design. He is privileged to be one of a few faculties who continuously and rigorously contributed to both architecture and interior design programs to enrich students experience. In addition, he has taught interior design courses to hospitality students at the Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management in Dubai to promote the role of good design as preset guidelines for successful hospitality practice. He currently advises interior design graduate students thesis at the Manipal University in Dubai. His principal approach to design teaching is to integrate theoretical and contextual investigations in the design studio, to address the aspect of practicality in developing the conceptual design ideas and to engage students through seminars and readings in issues related to architecture and urbanism such as the role of tradition, social responsibility, sustainability, and identity in shaping our environments. As a result of his holistic teaching, a number of his architecture students’ projects have secured competition recognition and awards, very validating indeed. |