HCI Researcher · Product Designer
Hanieh
Khaleghian
I envision futures where emergent technologies (XR, Spatial Computing, AI, and beyond) augment human creativity and unlock our collective imagination. I craft products, worlds, and experiences to reimagine how we live, learn, and dream: toward futures we haven't yet had the imagination to want.
Pozzo: I am blind. (Silence.)— Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Estragon: Perhaps he can see into the future.
Profile
Interfaces should make us more human, not less. That premise has shaped everything I've built: VR systems that measurably changed how students see their own potential, AI companions for people navigating genetic disease, a platform where children create and illustrate their own stories with AI. The medium always changes. The question is always the same: how do you build something that expands what people dare to imagine?
That meant designing the process as well as the product. The Career XRcade and Imagined Arcade frameworks gave students, educators, and industry experts a replicable co-creative system for building VR career simulations at scale, deployed globally through Verizon, with published gains in student creative self-efficacy and career interest. The products came from the same commitment: a social platform for rare disease communities, AI health companions, a storytelling app for children.
I've directed cross-disciplinary teams of researchers, engineers, and designers through problems that didn't yet have names, toward products none of them would have built alone. As a cofounder, I've also built from zero. What I bring to design leadership is an unusual combination: the strategic imagination to define direction before there's a roadmap, the research fluency to know when intuition needs proof, and the craft to make an imagined future real enough to ship. Underneath all of it is a single commitment: designing the systems that determine who gets to imagine with powerful technology, and on whose terms.
Design Practice Toolkit
Six approaches that shape how I enter any problem, across any medium and scale.
Asking 'what-if' to expose hidden assumptions and open alternate futures.
Choreographing physical and virtual space so that environments speak, move, and invite reflection.
Embedding play and game mechanics so exploration and learning feel like joyful discovery.
Designing experiences intended to spark imagination and inviting us to rethink, reframe and rebuild.
Designing Human-AI collaboration where humans design the systems that design the artifact - for humans.
Building replicable systems so non-experts can work creatively with technologies that were never designed for them.
Available for select collaborations and speaking engagements.
hanieh.khaleghian@gmail.com