Nidhi Singh Rathore is a designer, researcher, and educator who explores the application of design methodologies to civic engagement and social innovation. She is an Assistant Professor of Design at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University. As a brown foreign-born woman living in the United States, Rathore continually explores her position and privilege, reflecting it in her creative practice. Through her work, she intends to dive deeper into the hidden complexities and economies of the virtual and physical world in order to redefine how we interpret our relationship to the political, cultural, and digital landscapes—grounded in the relationship between the global north and south. With a value-centered approach, her work deconstructs nebulous concepts, brings people together, and breaks down intricate challenges to create better and more equitable interventions.
Rathore also writes, publishes, and forwards the discussion on design's relationship with power hoarding to critique design practice through a lens of race, gender, and privilege. This understanding comes from her lived experience as a public servant, where she developed an understanding of the ways marginalization and inequity stand in the way of civic participation and the role design can play in activating democracy. She has collaborated with the Stanford Impact Labs, exploring design's role in addressing societal challenges like housing insecurity, and Cedars Sinai Cancer Research Center for Health Equity—by way of Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design—to reimagine cancer clinical screening and outreach.
SELECT projects
SOAR & Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Care Guide
Culturally and linguistically accessible abortion care resources are not just helpful—they are powerful. I served as a Strategic Partner for this project and supported SOAR in creating a community and trauma-informed toolkit. This care guide is available in 20 South Asian languages and distributed nationwide in the United States through South Asians for Abortion.
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 worldwide — 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 to tackle housing insecurity in Los Angeles by creating more affordable housing. We received a $1 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to make our proposed LA ADU Accelerator Program a reality.
La Fábula de las Faldas
In 2018, I conducted a design-ethnography project in Mexico over three months. In this project, 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 into a paper (soon to be published).
Recent PRESENTATIONS & PUBLICATIONS
Cumulus Monterrey 2024
Shifting Graphic Design Pedagogy: Co-Creating with Cancer Survivors for Inclusive Clinical Trials
Advancing Research
Industry Junctures: Paths Forward for User Experience Research
Watch Video
DC Design Week, 2024
FutureTalks: An AI Debate
Design Research Society 2024 Conference
Empowering Stakeholders to Address Gentrification's Impact on Urban Schooling
Design Commit 2024
Designing for Impact: Elevating Employee Experience and Service Delivery in Tandem
Learn X Design 2023
The (Re)Search for Inclusive Healthcare: Designing Pedagogy and a Reflexive Practice
Policy Design and Practice Journal, Special Issue 2022
Dismantling traditional approaches: community-centered design in local government
Code for America 2022
Iterating community-centered design initiatives:
Moving towards shared decision-making in local government
Tableau Data Conference 2022 Conference
Dashboarding is Storytelling
Civic Design Conference 2021 • Inaugural
Panelist, “Shifting towards community-centered design”
Tableau Gov Summit 2021 Conference
Supporting Policymakers with Empathetic and Reflective Design