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Biography
I am an Assistant Professor at The Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (ICCIT), University of Toronto. I work at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Participatory Design, and Design for Social Justice. My research investigates the role design as a socio-material practice can play in supporting how communities reconfigure or reimagine living in social environments that are riven by cultural, generational, or organizational differences. This work has given me the honor to work directly with a rich set of community groups in NYC, Toronto, and refugee camps in Iraq.
My research draws on my multidisciplinary training in architecture, software engineering, ethnography, and philosophy. Despite using quantitative methods in the past, I currently lean towards qualitative methods due to the nuanced understandings they afford of the communities I work with.
Prior to my current research on design and difference, I spent 4 years studying shelter customization and permanence in war-zone refugee camps and designing/testing low-tech shelter sketching interfaces supported with computer vision and fabrication algorithms. And before that, I was active in the Ubiquitous Computing/Responsive Architecture research area.