Designer, researcher & strategist; at the intersection of research, data, and policy.
I am a South Asian designer and researcher who applies design methodologies to reimagine civic engagement. My multidisciplinary and value-centered practice focuses on deconstructing nebulous concepts, bringing people together, and breaking down complex problems—for better and equitable services. I lead civic design at Montgomery County and formerly worked for Los Angeles Innovation Team.
In my spare time, I work with environmental and human rights collectives, create political art, and lend my expertise to fellows at Stanford Impact Labs, which is a Stanford University-wide initiative incubated at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. My practice is built upon advocacy, civic engagement, and social issues such as housing insecurity, equity in opportunity, and social media economies.
selected projects
Re(Search) for Inclusive Healthcare
As a Transdisciplinary Studio Advisor, I worked with Monica Schlaug to challenge design students to create strong messaging and communication systems to help community-based healthcare providers, health clinics, primary care physicians, advocates, and leaders spread awareness about cancer clinical trials to patients, especially from Latinx and Korean communities. Working alongside sponsors Cedars-Sinai Research Center for Health Equity, Designmatters, and the local community, we developed research-informed tools of engagement in a 14-week class.
Rethinking Kids, Technology, and Wellbeing
I worked with the Stanford Social Impact Labs to create a virtual workshop session for Jeffery Hancock to understand how people perceive the harms and benefits of using social technologies, which are likely to be enduring, and which are topical or fleeting.
Network-by-Desire
A project close to my heart; in Networks-by-desire, netizens transform part(s) of the internet they desire, from creating more followers to generating fabricated likes. They employ custom terminals across the world — click cafes in cities like Chittagong, Manila, or Mumbai — to streamline the process of fake content generation and gain a larger audience. These terminals guide the innominate digital farmers to develop more fake entities for our social technologies. Showcased at Abierto Mexicano de Diseño; Eyes of the City - Bi-City Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture; New Now - Media Design Practices.
Humanizing Homelessness
As a design fellow and core policy team member, I designed ideation sessions, workshops, participatory design, and co-design activities that helped the City understand how we can tackle the housing insecurity in Los Angeles by creating more affordable housing. We received $1 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to make our proposed program a reality, and the program is called LA ADU Accelerator Program.
La Fábula de las Faldas
In Mexico, a design-ethnography project where I worked with Latina women to understand and deconstruct the impact of migration on Mexican communities— by using clothing as a journey mapping tool. The research done during this project was translated in a paper, Hacking the Research Fabric, which expands on contemporary and evolving research models of design research. Soon to be published in Insight 2018 Conference’s publication.
For more projects, browse work, and for research documentation, browse case studies.
selected CONFERENCES
Code for America 2022
Iterating community-centered design initiatives:
Moving towards shared decision-making in local government
Tableau Data Conference 2022
Dashboarding is Storytelling
DC Service Jam ‘22
Service Design Coach
Adobe Design Mix ‘21
Keynote, “Government is People”
Civic Design Conference ‘21 • Inaugural
Panelist, “Shifting towards community-centered design”
Tableau Gov Summit ‘21 Conference
Speaker, “Supporting Policymakers with Empathetic and Reflective Design”
ELGL Pop-up Conference
Panelist, “Equity and data in the time of COVID-19”