FUTURE HERITAGE

Nuria García Arbós speaks with Royal College of Art graduate Wael Alkaydi about the material possibilities of date seeds and the uneasy relationship between AI and human creativity.

We meet over Zoom. My laptop screen is corrupted, with L-shaped lines running down its left side, obscuring almost half of what I can see. Technology and I have a troubled relationship. Funnily enough, it reminds me of Wael's website, although for him, technology appears to be more of an asset than a hindrance.

A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Wael works between fine art, design and speculative futures, questioning the relationship between technological advancement and cultural preservation. His project Future Heritage begins with the discarded seeds of dates, a fruit deeply embedded in the agricultural and religious life of the Gulf. Through a series of material experiments, these overlooked remnants become the starting point for a larger investigation into craftsmanship, AI, and the transmission of cultural knowledge.

How do you approach art, and how does your heritage show up in your work or your methods?

For my practice, I use fine art to ask questions, and then design to answer them.

The message I try to convey is about the future and what humanity is about. It's always about how to bring society closer together, how we can build a community, get individuals to integrate themselves, and actually get them to want to do it, rather than forcing them. During my master's, I was doing a lot of speculative and discursive design, thinking about alternative realities. At the time, I was very against the use of AI, but I was encouraged to use it in some capacity, as so many designers were using it.

I really wanted to do a material investigation, looking at circular systems and regenerative projects. I was also trying to connect my practice with my heritage, and I had the idea of using date seeds to make a material that was usable and durable. That's why I called it Future Heritage.

The choice of date seeds is significant. Across the Gulf, the date palm carries a history - they are associated with hospitality, sustenance and religious observance, yet their seeds are routinely discarded. Wael's project begins by reconsidering this relationship between cultural significance and material waste. Rather than simply designing a new object, he set out to understand the material itself. Extracting, washing, drying, grinding and binding the seeds, he investigated their physical properties through repeated trials. The process involved unpredictable results and the gradual development of a composite material.

While AI helped him explore possibilities and research methods, it was the physical process of making, and of getting things wrong, that became central to the work.

The resulting object is a speculative Subha, an Islamic prayer chaplet traditionally used for dhikr, the remembrance of God. Made from a date-seed composite, its irregular, weathered appearance evokes an artefact recovered from an imagined future. The object brings together agricultural waste, religious continuity and the possibility that the materials of everyday life might outlast the societies that once assigned them meaning.

In this sense, Future Heritage asks what remains of cultural identity when the objects and practices through which it is expressed are transformed.

How do you think craftsmanship and AI will coexist in the future without diminishing the role of the maker?

You can use AI to do the whole work for you or completely rebel against it. For me, there has to be something in between, to have the best of both worlds. You retain the responsibility of coming up with the idea because, right now, so much of art is about ideation rather than execution. Art is about the process of how you come up with an idea. AI can help you with researching, thinking about different materials or looking at your own project from a different angle.

So it's more of a resource, an addition rather than a threat?

Yes, it's a tool. At the same time, I see it as a danger, and I don't think I understand it as much as tech companies do, or even as much as they say they do. But it lacks the depth of human creativity.

What becomes apparent in Wael's work is that the distinction between technological assistance and artistic authorship is not always straightforward. AI might suggest a material process, but it cannot experience its physical resistance: the texture of a mixture, the fragility of a prototype, or the intuition that develops through repetition.

His project also raises a question about the future of craft itself -

If craftsmanship has traditionally depended on knowledge passed between people, often through observation and practice rather than written instruction, what happens when that process is increasingly mediated by algorithms?

On the subject of human creation and artistry, how do you think craftsmanship will evolve in the coming years?

The mainstream sphere will become a bit less traditional. It will be more about robotics and production lines, about consumers and the consumer economy. But you'll still be able to find places disconnected from cities, where generational knowledge is passed down, where people practise by doing and make for the sake of learning. Learning by getting their hands dirty, basically. Craftsmanship is something humans will fight to keep around, even if the majority of the population or the economy doesn't go that way.

I really appreciate how transparent you are about your methodology. Rather than just showing the finished object, you make the entire process visible.

I made it transparent because a lot of my work moves between fine art and design, so I didn't want people to come across it as though I'd randomly arrived at the outcome.

Showing my methodology is actually partly thanks to my education, which placed a lot of emphasis on rationalising. I put everything into perspective before you even see the final project, so you're able to understand the process and the journey I've been through.

It puts a lot of emphasis on the process, which is something we're moving away from with AI now, which focuses instead on the outcome.

In the final stage of Future Heritage, he imagines a new kind of Silk Road: a network of material exchange and craft collaboration across Asia. His proposed 'soft Silk Road' considers how overlooked agricultural by-products, from date seeds in the Gulf to rice husks elsewhere in Asia, could become the foundations of new circular economies. In this imagined future, regional materials and inherited knowledge are resources through which new cultural and economic relationships might emerge. Here, the future is imagined through the reinterpretation of what already exists.

You grew up between Saudi Arabia and Geneva, and you're now based in London. How has the approach to creativity, art and design differed across these three places?

In Saudi, you used to just be told what to draw. I'd draw a house, mountains, and I loved that I still had my own agency to build my composition, but the outcome was predefined for you. Maybe that's where my methodology comes from, in defining my outcome. Then I went to boarding school in Switzerland, where teachers gave us a lot of freedom. We started with self-portraits. I struggled a bit. I didn't know what I was doing for a couple of years. It took me up to three years to develop my own visual identity, style and thinking. At the beginning, I found it very challenging. Blank paper used to scare me.

And what about London?

London is much more mature. People are actually doing their own thing. London wants you to put yourself out there, be unique, meet people. I always feel like I'm missing out on something, like I need to be connected. But when I go back home, everyone is still growing. The government is encouraging people to go into art, and it's a bit easier to enter the creative scene back home. It's not that art hasn't existed - it's just becoming more present in the public sphere.

Maybe this movement between different cultural and educational environments is what makes Wael's approach to heritage so compelling. Future Heritage ultimately proposes a future in which progress need not come at the expense of cultural memory. A discarded seed becomes a material, a material becomes an object of faith, and an object becomes a way of imagining new forms of exchange. What endures is the human capacity to find meaning in making.