About

I am an Industry Assistant Professor at New York University at the Integrated Digital Media program in the department of Technology, Culture & Society, where I teach various studio courses in interaction, systemic and game design, courses in qualitative design research, and in design studies and history, and co-direct the PhD program in Human-Centered Design, Technology and Innovation.

My research interests intersect between design studies and history, philosophy of technology, and critical cultural studies. My dissertation work and scholarly project has revolved around my sustained involvement with the ‘decolonial turn’ in design, with my principal interests and contributions centering on questions of how non-Anglo-European (AE) knowledge systems can inform, extend, and critique contemporary design and technology production and practice, drawing on a variety of intellectual discourses and genealogies from fields outside of design: philosophy, cultural anthropology, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. I’m also interested in the politics of knowledge production in the field, something that ties into my work on teaching theory and research in design education.

Apart from design studies and history, I also teach research methods and systems thinking to students, and from time to time, design studios: before academia, I worked as a professional graphic designer, and as a user experience and game designer. I now channel my creative practice into digital humanities projects that aim to foster the public understanding of, and engagement with, scientific issues as these intersect with perspectives and concerns from the arts and humanities.

I was a founding member of the Decolonising Design platform and the Architecture Design Research Lab in Karachi, and also do academic consulting focusing on curriculum development for design programsat the undergraduate level. I have helped design the curricula for the communication design programs at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and Habib University in my hometown of Karachi.

What I’ve been working on recently: I just wrapped up an NEH-funded grant project that brings together perspectives from the natural sciences, humanities, and design on the smallest of things, moss, in order to rethink how we might redesign public digital humanities archives. The process we undertook has been documented here, and the archive we created as a deliverable for the project can be accessed here. The other project I wrapped up this year was a videogame for NYU Tandon’s IDBE initiative called Points of View(ing), which will be rolled out to the undergraduate population at Tandon in 2025 and involves learning to navigate the politics of difference at school.