A photograph of Rishi drawing at a whiteboard. Rishi is a bespectacled man in his late-twenties, bald with brown skin and a trimmed beard and mustache. He is wearing a black full-sleeved t-shirt, and drawing on a whiteboard in profile.

Hello there! My name is Rishi.

I am a designer and human-computer interaction (HCI) researcher. I build and study new interfaces that support meaningful collaboration across space and over time.

I recently completed my PhD in the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. I was part of the ACME Lab and advised by Ellen Do.

Here is my CV, a list of publications, and a video of my defense.

Before joining ATLAS, I completed an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering and a graduate degree in Interaction Design, both from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Research

With new technologies seeking to radically change the way we live and work, for better and for worse, I attempt to counter narratives of technological determinism by using design to give us:

  1. Reasons to think, about different approaches to technology in the everyday,
  2. Reasons to turn, away from seemingly inevitable trajectories of development, and towards pathways more strongly connected to our current experience of technology use, and
  3. Reasons to try, and continue on these pathways to realize visions of technology that work for all of us.
A sketch representing the reasons to think, to turn, and to try.

#1 Designing the Everyday Spatial Computer

We all have friends, family, and colleagues with whom we interact everyday across cities, countries, and continents. Video calls are great, but not enough. The promise of spatial interaction via AR/VR headsets has loomed just out of reach for decades. In my dissertation, I explored how we can do more with devices we all already have to design more “everyday spatial computers” that help us work together despite distance.

An overview of key projects in the dissertation.
  1. I designed and developed DualStream, a mobile-based system that enables people to share and interact with spatial representations of each other and the environments they are in across distance (published at ISMAR ‘23).
  2. I led a study of mobile spatial collaboration across video calls and AR, uncovering how systems like DualStream can support interactions that come quite close to the way we explore spaces and work together in real life (published at CSCW ‘26).
  3. I then designed and developed a prototype system that maximizes the potential of everyday artifact ecologies for spatial interaction, and showed how such an approach can better support the seamful trajectories of hybrid work (under review).

Much of this work was supported by Ericsson Research (CA, USA), where I also worked on developing systems for network-adaptive spatial remote communication (Summer 2023).

#2 Designing Interfaces to Support Temporal Work with AI

I worked with the Intentional Meetings team at Microsoft Research Cambridge on three projects about supporting knowledge work across the project lifecycle with Generative AI (Summer 2024).

I led a project focused on the temporal work that people and teams engage with across timescales.

  1. Drawing on insights from a qualitative study of a series of real team meetings, and a review of research from the cognitive and social sciences, I developed conceptual devices to help translate temporal actions into spaces for design.
  2. I built new prototyping tools to understand AI capabilities when operating on multimodal meeting data across time.
  3. I then designed new AI-powered interface concepts, demonstrating the value of a design process grounded in how real work actually takes place, instead of the ever-changing capabilities of the next model release.
Visualizing the process of designing interfaces with temporal work in mind.

Alongside this work (published at DIS ‘25), I supported projects about how AI can help teams prepare for more intentional meetings (published at CHIWORK ‘25) and reflect on their effectiveness as these meetings take place (published at CHI ‘25).

#3 Designing for Learning, Creativity, and Collaboration

Along the way, I have also worked on projects about fostering data visualization literacy through DIY tangible interfaces (VIS ‘23), supporting musical collaboration across distance with AR (Frontiers in VR), reviewing and envisioning the trajectory of Cross-Reality XR interaction research (TVCG ‘26), and more (here is a longer list of publications).

More

Some other things I’ve worked on over the years:

Music

I sporadically write songs and make music. You can listen to some of it here, with older tracks on SoundCloud. In another life, I was in a band called Bluemoss, with five friends of mine.