How I Work
Creative, grounded approaches to social strategies and the communities they serve, anywhere in the world.
I spent seven years inside institutions learning how strategy gets made, money moves, and decisions become programs. At Stanford, I deepened the design methods I had already begun using in that work: listening closely, finding the patterns that matter, building something concrete, and testing it in the world. That approach now runs through a national reproductive-health strategy in Nepal, an open-call funding process in Indonesia, research-governance tools for a Great Plains Tribal Nation, and a 150-student design program in Karachi.
Listen deeply
Every project starts in someone else's world, on their terms. 30+ ethnographic interviews with Indigenous scholars and Tribal community members. 36 community conversations across nine South Carolina counties. 400+ open-call applications from Indonesian youth climate movements, read instead of filtered. The HELIOS study unfolded over two years because trust-building and Tribal governance set the pace.
Translate with the people closest to the work
Synthesis doesn't happen in a back office. Design sprints with health providers and NGOs across Nepal, frontloaded so the Ministry of Health received a vision worth owning. Challenge briefs for 150 students in Karachi, co-developed with Habib University's IDEAL team and named in Urdu. Grant compliance reworked at the table with grassroots movements: articles of incorporation drafted together, budget projections accepted where a young organization had no audit history to show. By the time a ministry or a president sees the work, the people it affects have already shaped it.
Build things communities keep
The test of the work is what stays behind. A plain-language consent translator that runs entirely on a local machine, so no community data leaves the room. A six-year national strategy living inside Nepal's own health framework. A grant structure that funded movements a foundation couldn't previously reach. A curriculum Habib University kept for its next cohort, and an 80-page publication Don Norman recommends as a text for design schools.
Put it in the world
The work gets better when real behavior can answer questions a workshop cannot. I test systems in context, then change the rules when reality disagrees with the plan: 24 student teams building physical prototypes in Karachi; AI-powered historical objects circulating between strangers; research tools tested with the communities they were built to serve. Build, observe, adjust, repeat.
Design solution layers
Any social challenge can be answered at more than one altitude. When I ideate, I work across five solution layers: data, technologies, products, experiences, and systems. Each layer holds a different kind of answer, and the strongest strategies usually combine several. A consent translator is a product carrying a data practice. AI characters embedded in hand-turned figurines are a technology inside an experience. An open call is a system that changes what a foundation can fund. Naming the layer early keeps a team from solving a systems problem with a product, or the reverse.
If your team works on problems where the people affected should shape the answer, I’d love to talk.
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