now
updated 7 oct 2026
For summer 2027, I'm looking for a research visit with an academic group, or an internship in an industry research lab. If you see a fit, let's talk.
- building
- The art finder journal, a Reflection Machine that answers a journal entry with a poem, a painting, a song or a film. See it work below
- teaching
- Associate Instructor on INFO-I 494, the senior capstone, this fall.
- in review
- A paper on how UX practitioners interpret harm as a design consideration.My contribution to work on ethics in design practice, led by Ritika Gairola in UXP2.
- out soon
- “Priming the Design Process to Improve Student Learning”, in the Journal of Technology Education in mid-October.
publications
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2026
Wrangling and Supporting Uncertainty in HCI Education Practices: Towards an Affective Understanding of Designer Experience
Abdul Moeed Asad and Colin M. Gray · ACM EduCHI ’26
We propose a preliminary diagnostic tool for spotting the emotional toll that design work takes on students.
pedagogy + practice
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2026
Toward an Architectural Model of Design Methods: Meta-Methods, Proto-Methods, and Method Building Blocks
Colin M. Gray, Shruthi Sai Chivukula and Abdul Moeed Asad · DRS 2026 (Design Research Society)
Why design methods are more than checklists, and how they are shaped by the people and situations that use them.
practice
I got to enter Colin's methods brain for this one.
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2026
Priming the Design Process to Improve Student Learning
Nathan Mentzer, Abdul Moeed Asad, Wonki Lee, Andrew Jackson and Scott Bartholomew · Journal of Technology Education, forthcoming
A design primer didn't change students' learning outcomes, but our work revealed how rarely classroom documentation matches professional practice.
pedagogy
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2025
Engaging Learners Everywhere: The Interactive Synchronous HyFlex Method
Nathan Mentzer, Abdul Moeed Asad, Adrie A. Koehler, Lakshmy Mohandas and Elnara Mammadova · Purdue University Press, open-access book
Teaching students in the room and online at the same time is harder than it sounds, and educators are right to question the quality of engagement. The book makes a method built over four years of research free for any teacher to use. The research behind it has won awards, including Purdue's Steps to Leaps in Faculty Research award.
pedagogy
A joy to make: I was trusted to lead the writing, and got to and photograph many classrooms.
My illustrations for the book being drawn, one after another: a find-in-document bar, a how-to-join window, speech bubbles about attending class in person or online, a transfer-approved stamp in a passport, and more. -
2023
Pakistani Teens and Privacy – How Gender Disparities, Religion and Family Values Impact the Privacy Design Space
Maryam Mustafa, Abdul Moeed Asad, Shehrbano Hassan, Urooj Haider, Zainab Durrani and Katharina Krombholz · ACM CCS ’23
What privacy means to teenagers in Pakistan, and what that means for design.
practice
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2020
Student as Co-designer: Processes of Planning and Teaching with the Student in Mind
Yasira Waqar and Abdul Moeed Asad · in Building Courage, Confidence, and Capacity in Learning and Teaching through Student-Faculty Partnership, edited by Alison Cook‑Sather and Chanelle Wilson, Lexington Books
A professor and her former student redesign her course together. She writes about the discomfort of asking an undergraduate what wasn't working; he writes about her willingness to let him make substantive changes.
pedagogy
projects
I present Reflection Machines: research-through-design experiments that make the hard but crucial work of reflecting a little stranger, and a little more delightful.
Building them is how I study the affective experience of design. They double as teaching tools, for my students' reflection and my own.
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2026
Art finder journal
A journal entry goes in, and it retrieves existing works (a poem, a painting, a song or a film) instead of giving advice. Below is one of mine; file it to replay what it found.
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. It makes me take my own thoughts more seriously, and it often leads to fun cross-pollination between ideas. Right now, a course on mysticism is helping me think about strange interactions in my other work.
reading curiosity · wonder · renewalStevensretrievedpoemThirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird · Stevens
I 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 journal · 2026 · a replay: one of my entries, filed, and the poem it retrieved -
2026
Haiku machine
Turns a written reflection into a haiku and prints it as a postcard. Printing was a choice, so students wrote reflections worth keeping. Two real ones below.
fig. haiku machine · 2026 · two printed postcards, one turned over The breakthrough was advice from my minor advisor, Vivek Vellanki, to print them as postcards.
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2023–24
Threads of Experience
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. The colours were the incentive: write longer and deeper, and the model could colour your thread more richly.
fig. threads of experience · 2023–24 Words on a path, borrowed from experience maps.
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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 Our EduCHI paper goes into the theory behind one of the key mindsets: embracing uncertainty.
I'd love to hear how these land in someone else's classroom.
teaching
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2026
Design and Implementation of an Information System I (INFO-I 494)
Indiana University Bloomington. Associate Instructor on the teaching team for the 230‑student senior capstone; mini-lectures on design process models, making sense of data, sketching and co-evolution.
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2026
Human-Computer Interaction Design Independent Capstone (INFO-I 694)
Indiana University Bloomington. 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. Every semester, one of my teams placed in the top five at the Purdue Polytechnic Design and Innovation Challenge.
Mindset Memoirs grew out of this course.
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2019–22
LUMS, Lahore
I started teaching as an undergraduate, co-designing a course with Yasira Waqar as a student partner. Over the next two years I helped Usama Waheed move The Psychology of Technology online during the pandemic and was head TA for ICT for Development, giving feedback in its design crits. After I graduated, Dr Yasira asked me back to co-teach Meaningful Learning with Technology and to run a workshop series for teachers, principals and superintendents.
full list in my cv (pdf)
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. Partners on this work included the Gates Foundation, the World Bank and the UK's FCDO.
write to me
I'm always open to nerding out about design theory, with you or your classroom, whether that's a crit, a guest lecture or a paper together. My summers are open, and I'd love to spend one inside another group, as an intern or visiting researcher.
Dear Moeed,