Innovation Playground

The final showcase is the scene I keep returning to. Twenty-four teams of teenagers filled Habib University with prototypes: a systems game for building financial habits, sheltered rider hubs for motorcycle delivery drivers caught in monsoon season, wellbeing kits made for people with different reading and writing abilities, because “go journal about it” only works if you can write. The university’s president walked the floor. So did several vice presidents. These students had studied a real user group and gotten out of their water for the first time in their lives, responding to challenges with actual implications for the city of Karachi, and they exceeded every expectation I had. I designed the program hoping it would work. I left invited back to run it again in 2027.

Innovation Playground was an eight-session design thinking studio I created and directed for Habib University’s summer school: 150 students, 24 teams, and 12 coaches drawn from faculty and staff across departments. Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of the Stanford d.school, recruited me for it on the strength of my Stanford teaching, and this was the first time the program had ever been run. Every team took on one of six challenge briefs I authored, each named in Urdu and each rooted in the city itself: Baithak (spaces of belonging), Barsaat (monsoon and resilience), Roz ka Safar (the daily commute), Ankahi (emotional wellbeing and stigma), Hisaab Kitab (financial futures), and Screen ke Paar (social media and digital dignity). For two weeks, Karachi was the design lab.

The hard part: I had never been to Pakistan. A curriculum written in Palo Alto could easily bounce off a classroom in Karachi. So the challenge areas were co-developed with Habib’s IDEAL team before I ever landed, and once there I treated informal conversations as part of the job, pulling Urdu phrases, dhabas, and local rap groups into the material so it would meet students where they actually live.

Most of the twelve coaches were meeting design thinking for the first time themselves, and supporting 24 teams meant supporting them first. I wrote them a 60-page facilitator manual: run-of-shows, discussion prompts, examples of strong and weak prototypes, and troubleshooting for the failure points I could see coming. Then I spent the program checking in with every coach and repeating the same reassurance: design work is messy and non-linear on purpose. At the showcase, one coach summed up the whole experience for me: “the one thing I would say about design is, trust the process.”

The program ended; the artifacts stayed. Habib retained the full curriculum package, session plans, performance rubrics, and the designed course syllabus, as a reference for future cohorts. I’m continuing to advise the university’s VP of Strategic Advancement on its Communication & Design undergraduate curriculum, and I led design workshops for its Office of People and Culture. Innovation Playground runs again in 2027.