HCI Researcher · Product Designer
Hanieh
Khaleghian, PhD
I envision futures where emergent technologies (XR, Spatial Computing, AI, and beyond) augment human creativity and unlock our collective imagination. For the last twelve years I've crafted 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.)
Estragon: Perhaps he can see into the future.
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?
My PhD in HCI Design at Arizona State University's Herberger Institute sat between two lineages: XR as a medium for human experience under Dr. Robert LiKamWa at Meteor Studio, and worldbuilding and imagination as design discourse under Dr. Ed Finn at the Center for Science and the Imagination. The research shipped as Career XRcade, the Verizon Innovative Learning VR platform with 50+ playful mini-games where I served as Product Lead for four years. The dissertation, Designing Imaginable and Playable Futures: Co-Creative XR Toolkits for Envisioning Careers, was published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, IEEE VR, iLRN, Springer CCIS, and HCI International.
The process, like the product, is also a design artifact. The Career XRcade and Imagined Arcade frameworks gave students, educators, industry experts, and AI a replicable co-creative system for building VR career simulations at scale, deployed globally through Verizon, presented at IEEE VR in Orlando and HCII in Sweden, with published gains in student creative self-efficacy and career interest.
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. Today I'm Head of Design at a stealth AI health startup in San Francisco. The work has spanned AI startups, academic XR research, and design research at UC Berkeley's GenAI Playground, where I investigate how AI can act as a creative partner rather than an answer-giver for children ages 7–12. As cofounder of Plaio, the AI storytelling product that emerged from this research, I've built from zero and tested the platform with families across four workshops in San Francisco and at UC Berkeley.
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 take an idea from concept through a working, shipped product myself.
Design Practice Toolkit
I am designing the systems that determine who gets to imagine with powerful technology, and on whose terms.
Six approaches I use to get there, whatever the medium or the 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.
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