A. Singh, PhD

Abhigyan Singh is an Assistant Professor of Design Anthropology for Social Change at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft. He is also a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute). He was a Co-Lead Social Economic Subtask (2023-2025) of the International Energy Agency’s Global Observatory on Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading (GOP2P), and serves on the Executive Committee of PowerWeb Institute, and Climate Governance Flagship of TU Delft.

Abhigyan was one of the co-organisers of the EthnoBorrel meetup (2019–2022), a network of over 700 industrial and academic ethnographers. He co-convened the Energy Anthropology Network’s panel, At the Grid Edge: homes, neighbourhoods and energy markets, at the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA 2020) biennial conference. In 2022, he co-organised the PowerWeb Conference, When Social Meets Technical: The Energy Transition for our Future.

His work has been exhibited at diverse venues such as Dutch Design Week (2024, 2019, 2017) and has won many awards, such as the 2021 WWNA Apply Award from the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ Applied Anthropology Network (EASA-AAN), and Second Prize at Cumulus Exhibition (‘Young Creators for Better City & Better Life’).

Before entering academia, he worked as a User Interface Designer (2005-07) at Infosys Technologies Limited in India. As part of his professional designer role, he has worked on the various user experience design aspects of IT applications for multinational clients such as Bank of America, Kmart & Sears (USA), BNSF Railways (USA), and Pfizer. He was awarded the Infosys Communication Design Group (CDG) Annual Excellence Award (2007) and the ‘Higher Standard Award’ by Bank of America (2006).

Within the broad theme of Design Anthropology for Social Change, Abhigyan's current research engages with the following areas:

• Social and cultural aspects of emergent energy and climate futures
• Fairness, inclusion, and justice in energy and climate transitions
• (Non-Market) Value Exchanges (such as reciprocity, gifting, sharing, and bartering)
• Social Design beyond neoliberalism
• Design + Digital Ethnography
• Design perspectives from non-Western contexts

Abhigyan is also developing the following topics as focal points for future research exploration:

• Sustainable design from Indian antiquity
• Designing from Indian philosophical perspectives
• Design dialogues across the global North–South divide
• Designing for/with reflective consciousness
• Multi-species design ethnography

Abhigyan holds a PhD from the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), a Master’s in New Media Design from Aalto University School of Art, Design, and Architecture (Finland), and a Bachelor’s in Information and Communication Technology from DA-IICT (India). His fascination and engagement with social and economic anthropology deepened through coursework and collaborations at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam.

Abhigyan's doctoral dissertation, Conceptualizing inter-household energy exchanges: An anthropology-through-design approach, was awarded the WWNA Apply Award by the European Association of Social Anthropologists' Applied Anthropology Network (EASA-AAN). 'Beyond Rational Energy Market', an interactive data visualisation as part of his research, was selected for exhibition at various venues such as the Dutch Design Week 2017.

His master's thesis, Design Opportunities and Challenges in Indian Urban Slums - Community Communication and Mobile Phones, was awarded Aalto University's Department of Media-Stipend, was exhibited and awarded the Second Prize at Cumulus 20th Anniversary Exhibition ('Young Creators for Better City & Better Life'), where over 400 student works from around 50 design schools were showcased, hosted by Tongji University in combination with Shanghai World Expo 2010, China.

After his PhD, Abhigyan briefly worked as a postdoctoral researcher (2020-21) at Erasmus University School of Health Policy and Management and as a Guest Researcher (2019) at Cybersecurity Group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science (EEMCS), TU Delft.

His academic path has seen him in diverse roles—from research intern (2012) at IBM Research (India) to interaction designer and programmer (2011-13) for the Multimedia Information Retrieval Lab and Parallel & Distributed Systems Group at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science (EEMCS), TU Delft, and earlier research assistant roles in Finland at Crucible Studio and the ARKI Research Group.