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, design studies and history, philosophy of technology, and critical cultural studies. My area interests lie in the philosophy and history of design and technology in the Indian subcontinent. 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, user experience and interface designer, 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 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 reflecting on the recent decolonial turn in design.