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 courses in interaction and systems design, design research, and design studies, and direct the PhD program in Human-Centered Design, Technology and Innovation.

My research interests intersect between speculative design, critical design studies and history, the philosophy of technology, and critical cultural studies. My area interests lie in the philosophy and history of design and technology in the Indian subcontinent. I’m interested in questions of how non-Anglo-European (AE) knowledge can inform design and technology practices and paradigms, and about how imaginaries of non-AE alternatives have appeared in visual and material culture, i.e. in cosmotechnics and cosmofuturisms. I’m also interested in the politics of knowledge production in design, something that ties into my work on design education in multicultural or cosmopolitan contexts,.

Apart from design studies, I also have interests and experience in graphic design, user experience and interface design, game design, and systemic design. In my creative practice, I’ve been quite involved as a designer and researcher on projects that aim to foster the public understanding of, and engagement with, scientific issues through broader and more interdisciplinary humanistic lens.

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 at the undergraduate level, and have helped design the curricula for the design programs at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and Habib University in Karachi.

Recently, I helped organize the 3rd North American PhD by Design symposium out of NYC, and have been working on an NEH grant 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. I live in Brooklyn and spend my time these days studying and thinking through and with moss, in an effort to think more vegetally, as I try and finish the draft for a monograph on design, decolonisation, and capitalism.