Shaharior
Areej Pranto

“What really happens on a construction site?”

I walked into university already asking to be on a construction site. Curiosity opened the gate: I asked, got approval, and stayed, watching how things were really built. Before my degree was finished I was supervising on site, and after my first two years I was hired as an engineer. Research ran alongside all of it.

At Muscat Laboratory I learned the rule that still guides me: never trust the surface. Before anything is built, someone has to find out what the ground will really do. On projects like the Muscat International Airport Expansion, that someone was me.

The same rule found me outside the lab too. For years I had walked past the street cafés where Bangladeshi workers gathered, and I thought I knew what those places were. When I supported fieldwork and sat down to listen, I learned they were living rooms for people with no room to live in, and job boards without any paper. I had been familiar with the place. I had never understood it.

“Can a dream carry its own weight?”

ZAP Comfortable Homes began as a dream: homes built around the people who live in them. I moved to Bangladesh to look beyond the Gulf, to understand the Asian market and to find out whether that dream could stand on its own. It could. Today it runs with a 32-member team, and I lead its operations.

The business taught me that the brief is rarely the real problem. One family came to us worried about their child's screen time. Instead of trying to change the child's habits, we changed the room: a full wall to draw on, shelves at the child's height, every surface safe. Within two weeks, their child was drawing every day.

Beyond the business, I kept asking questions, and followed some of them through independent research with the Engineering Society of Bangladesh.

“How do you turn a question into evidence?”

Germany was a deliberate choice. I wanted a formal degree in international project management, a closer understanding of the European construction industry, and to stay connected to different projects while I developed as a researcher.

At HFT Stuttgart I put a question from practice to the test: what actually carries a construction team through a crisis? I invited 350 practitioners to take part in a survey, and 92 responded. Nine of them gave me an hour each in in-depth interviews, speaking openly about what happens when a project begins to fail. I analysed every transcript by hand, in two full passes. The pattern was clear: teams that shared decision-making across levels held up better under mounting uncertainty than teams that relied on a single strong leader.

In Germany, I also joined EZBET e.V. as a member and volunteer.

“For whom?”

My fieldwork now follows people who move for work, in Oman and in Lisbon. In Lisbon, some people first told us the same thing: there is no housing. We kept talking, mapping and observing, and the picture became more uneven. Homes existed, but not everyone could find them, reach them or secure them.

The question changed from “Is there housing?” to “For whom, and how?”. Two words, and it became a different study.

“Who decides?”

Construction sites, a laboratory, a business, a thesis, fieldwork: different places, but one question keeps returning. When things change faster than the plan, who gets to decide, and do they know enough to decide well? I am ready to follow that question further, on a construction project or in doctoral research.