publications
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in review
A paper on how UX practitioners interpret harm as a design consideration.
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2026
Abdul Moeed Asad and Colin M. Gray. Wrangling and Supporting Uncertainty in HCI Education Practices: Towards an Affective Understanding of Designer Experience. EduCHI ’26
We propose a preliminary diagnostic tool for spotting the emotional toll that uncertain design work takes on students.
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2026
Colin M. Gray, Shruthi Sai Chivukula and Abdul Moeed Asad. Toward an Architectural Model of Design Methods: Meta-Methods, Proto-Methods, and Method Building Blocks. DRS 2026
Why design methods are more than checklists, and how they are shaped by the people and situations that use them.
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2026
Nathan Mentzer, Abdul Moeed Asad, Wonki Lee, Andrew Jackson and Scott Bartholomew. Priming the Design Process to Improve Student Learning. Journal of Technology Education, forthcoming
A design primer didn't change students' documentation, but it revealed how rarely classroom documentation matches professional practice.
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2025
Nathan Mentzer, Abdul Moeed Asad, Adrie A. Koehler, Lakshmy Mohandas and Elnara Mammadova. Engaging Learners Everywhere: The Interactive Synchronous HyFlex Method. Purdue University Press. Open-access book
How to teach students in the room and online at the same time.
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2023
Maryam Mustafa, Abdul Moeed Asad, Shehrbano Hassan, Urooj Haider, Zainab Durrani and Katharina Krombholz. Pakistani Teens and Privacy: How Gender Disparities, Religion and Family Values Impact the Privacy Design Space. CCS ’23
What privacy means to teenagers in Pakistan, and what that means for design.
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2020
Yasira Waqar and Abdul Moeed Asad. Student as Co-designer: Processes of Planning and Teaching with the Student in Mind. Lexington Books. Book chapter
What happened when a student helped design and teach a course.
projects
Reflection Machines: experiments that make the hard work of reflecting a little stranger, and a little more delightful. Each one has something to try.
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2026
Art finder
A reflection goes in, and it retrieves existing works (a poem, a painting, a song or a film) instead of giving advice.
oct 2, 2026 · 4:11 pm
An intellectual journal
I'd never realized how much an intellectual journal matters. At some point I decided not to think about work outside work hours, and that worked. But keeping an intellectual journal has revitalized something. Any thought I notice stays, and it helps when I write later. A course on mysticism is helping me think about strange interactions in my other work.
reading attention · continuity · curiosity · writing · mysticismStevensretrievedI know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
“There is value in the collision between these two modes of thinking.”Benjamin Voigt · Poetry Foundation
IAmong twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.III was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.IIIThe blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime.IVA man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.VI do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.VIIcicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.VIIO thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?VIIII know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.IXWhen the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles.XAt the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.XIHe rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds.XIIThe river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.XIIIIt was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.Wallace Stevens, 1917 · public domain · source: poets.org
saved as note · 4:12 pmfig. art finder · 2026 · one reflection, filed as an entry, and the poem it retrieved -
2026
Haiku machine
Turns a written reflection into a haiku and prints it as a postcard. Two real ones below.
fig. haiku machine · 2026 · two printed postcards, one turned over -
2023–24
Threads of Experience
A poster series, then an installation where people write a thread of their own experience, a language model colours it by emotional tone, and it joins everyone else's on a shared screen. Two of my own below.
pick a thread, or hover over one, to read it in full
fig. threads of experience · 2023–24 · two of my threads -
2023–24
Mindset Memoirs
Reflection prompts that introduce novice designers to professional design mindsets, developed over three semesters of teaching and studied through a thematic analysis of 56 students' reflections.
The prompts aren't a course on their own. Each set accompanies a class discussion and works best woven into a course's projects. Most mindsets come up twice, as an introduction and, about two months later, an integration.
mindfulness of process · part 1
How it will go
Before your project starts: what will your creative process look like? Draw it, from the first idea to the finished deliverable.
mindfulness of process · part 2
How it actually went
Watch Cynthia Atman on how designers work (5:20 to 13:38). Then redraw your process as it actually went, and explain what changed from your first drawing.
fig. mindset memoirs · 2023–24 · the two prompts for mindfulness of process
teaching
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2026
Senior capstone (INFO-I 494), Indiana University. Associate Instructor on the teaching team for 230 students; mini-lectures on design process models, making sense of data, sketching and co-evolution.
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2026
HCI/d independent capstone (INFO-I 694), Indiana University. Associate Instructor; feedback for 23 master's students in critiques and one-on-ones.
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2022–24
Design Thinking in Technology (TECH 12000), Purdue University. Instructor of record for two sections of about 40 students a semester, for four semesters. My teams placed in the top five at the Purdue Polytechnic Design and Innovation Challenge every semester.
+ what students wrote
“Not once did I feel like I was hitting a brick wall due to perceived superiority or seniority.”
from a TECH 12000 course evaluation -
2019–22
LUMS, Lahore. Co-instructor of Meaningful Learning with Technology with Yasira Waqar (2022); head teaching assistant for ICT for Development (2021); teaching assistant for The Psychology of Technology with Usama Waheed (2020); student co-designer and co-instructor of Curriculum: Teaching and Learning (2019).
design practice
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2021–22
Product designer and project manager, Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan, Lahore. The centre's first in-house designer: research-driven products for farmers, nursing mothers and at-risk children that reached over a million people.