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 and a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute). His research examines how energy and climate transitions are lived in neighbourhoods and communities across the Global North and Global South. He centres non-market value exchange (reciprocity, gifting, sharing); fairness, inclusion, and relationality; and advancing hybrid approaches that combine design, digital, and traditional ethnography.

He has led multiple design-ethnographic studies in India and the Netherlands and serves on the Editorial Board of Designing (Design Research Society). Recent leadership includes Co-Lead, Social & Economic Value, IEA GOP2P (2023–25) and committee roles with PowerWeb Institute and the Climate Governance Flagship. He has been active across disciplinary gatherings, including co-organising EthnoBorrel (2019–22), co-convening an Energy Anthropology Network panel at EASA 2020, and co-organising the PowerWeb 2022 conference. Before academia, he worked as a user interface designer at Infosys (2005–07) on UX for multinational clients (Bank of America; Kmart & Sears; BNSF Railway; Pfizer) and received the Infosys CDG Annual Excellence Award (2007) and Bank of America “Higher Standard” Award (2006). His work has been exhibited at Dutch Design Week and recognised with the WWNA Apply Award.

He currently supervises three PhD candidates: Gijs van Leeuwen (Transforming power through design: A design anthropological intervention in the local energy transitions, 2021-ongoing, IDE-TUD). Mert Akey (Integrating Big Data and Thick Data for Urban Climate Research: Towards an AI-embedded Conceptual Framework, 2023-ongoing, IDE-TUD). Alessandro Fornaroli (Codesigning Data-Driven Technologies in Living Labs, 2024–ongoing, BK-TUD).

Within the broad theme of Design Anthropology for Social Change, Abhigyan's current research current research focuses on:

• Lived social, cultural, and economic dynamics of emergent energy and climate futures at neighbourhood and community scales.
• Non-market Value Exchanges, such as reciprocity, gifting, sharing, bartering, and their design implications.
• Fairness, inclusion, and justice in energy and climate transitions
• Hybrid ethnographic methods (design + digital + traditional) for multi-scalar insights and designing actionable interventions.
• Designing for/with reflexivity in living labs and professional practice.
• Design perspectives from non-Western contexts.
• Social design beyond neoliberal logics

Emerging focal themes for future research explorations:

• Designing from Indian philosophical perspectives (such as Samkhya, Yoga) for reciprocity, care, transitions, and ethics.
• Multi-species design ethnography.
• Global North–Global South design dialogues: co-developing, translating, and adapting methods across contexts without extractivism.

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.