This case study explores how design research can improve public accessibility to Assam’s State Budget by addressing systemic, design, and cognitive barriers. Using ethnographic inquiry and design thinking, it focuses on understanding not just how to design, but for whom and why. Grounded in civic creativity and inspired by Sanders & Stappers’ framing of design for social innovation, the process embraces ambiguity, prioritizes stakeholder relevance, and treats legibility as a question of social meaning beyond the interface.

“Where is My Colour?” is a participatory design toolkit co-created with IT for Change to nurture negotiation skills and agency among adolescent girls in rural Karnataka, India. Developed through immersive fieldwork and iterative prototyping, it reframes real-life dilemmas into playful, role-based scenarios that spark collaboration, self-expression, and critical thinking. Designed for low-tech environments, the toolkit supports girls in rehearsing resistance, navigating social pressures, and reflecting on personal choices within a safe, facilitated space. Modular, culturally grounded, and scalable, it offers a feminist, design-led pathway to everyday empowerment.

This e-learning app is a design research initiative created to support A-MEP (Architecture, Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing) learners in acquiring practical BIM skills. Built through rapid iteration and informal inquiry, it responds to a shift from theory-heavy education to hands-on, digital learning. Designed in close collaboration with developers, the platform prioritizes ease of access, structured progression, and real-world relevance, empowering emerging professionals to upskill with confidence in a changing industry landscape.

This project reimagined ride sharing through a worker owned cooperative lens, employing ethnographic research, participatory co design and systems thinking to dismantle extractive platform dynamics. By centring drivers’ lived experiences, revealing tensions between algorithmic exploitation and desires for agency, the design strategy materialised as radically transparent service architectures (blockchain mediated profit sharing), democratic governance protocols (Ostrom inspired voting systems) and community driven narratives (multilingual mentorship, cooperative symbolism). The outcome, a pilot ecosystem engaging 3,000 plus drivers, demonstrated how relational design can redistribute power in gig economies, prioritising communal resilience over transactional efficiency and positioning platform cooperativism as a viable counter to Silicon Valley’s extractive ethos.

Mosaic Care is a speculative design project created as part of the Project Studio course at Parsons School of Design. The project explores the question: What might the elderly miss out on in the metaverse of the future? Our goal was to provoke discussion around the inequalities that could arise as the metaverse evolves, particularly for aging populations in China, Korea, and India.