Fatima Hamdani


practing//achieving
 as a multidisciplinary designer, researcher, and educator working across urban life, social justice, and South Asian studies.

My practice draws on archival research, folklore, and memory-making to understand how postcolonial cities are shaped by power, displacement, and everyday struggle, with a particular focus on Karachi and the Indian Ocean world. I work across design, mapping, storytelling, and participatory research, often in collaboration with communities, activists, and institutions, to surface marginalized histories and imagine more just urban futures.

Grounded in place-based and relational methods, I approach design not as a solution, but as a practice of listening, care, and repair. I am especially interested in how informal infrastructures, spatial practices, and cultural traditions carry political knowledge across generations.

I aim to develop tools and platforms that support political imagination, solidarity, and collective futures rooted in lived experience.

My work experience spans public institutions, research labs, and grassroots organizations across Pakistan and the United States.

I have worked in coastal resilience and community planning with the City of Boston, in archival and speculative design research at MIT, and as a Teaching Fellow and researcher at Harvard across design, public health, and the humanities. Prior to this,
I spent several years in financial inclusion and service design in Pakistan, working closely with women, micro-entrepreneurs, and informal economies.

These experiences shape a practice that moves between policy, archives, and everyday life, while remaining accountable
to the communities and places it engages.


Education
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Master of Design Studies,
Ecologies
2025

Habib University
Bachelor of Science (Hons),
Social Development & Policy
2019

Awards
& Grants Emerging Leaders Grant
Interfaith America
2026

Youth Climate Finance Alliance’s Movement Ignition Fund
Youth Climate Finance Alliance
2026

Racial Equity and Anti-Racism (REA) Fund
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
2025

Community Service Fellowship
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
2024

Deans’ Merit Scholar
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
2023 - 2025

Best Thesis Award in Urban Planning
Habib University
2019

Dean’s Honour List
Habib University
2018

Study Abroad Scholarship Award
Habib University
2017

Dean’s Honour List
Habib University
2016

Exhibitions
Workshops
Talks Mapping a City the Nation Cannot Hold: Karachi and the Indian Ocean
@ South Asia Institute Graduate Conference
University of Texas, Austin
2026

Freedom Iftar
@ MINARA Culture Salon x Cafe
2026

Visualizing Solidarities
@ Conference on the Jewish Left
Boston University
2026

Contested Land Ecologies
@ Kirkland Gallery
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
2025

Fictions of Containment: Runit Dome
@ Quotes Gallery
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
2024

Including Children in Urban Planning Decisions
@  Design Research Forum
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
2023
Skills
Figma
Adobe Suite
Sketch
QGIS, 
ArcGISPro

researching//thinking


Freedom Iftar
Collaboration with Felix Rosen within Archival Solidarities Collective
MINARA Culture Salon x Cafe
2026

An interfaith iftar was held during Ramadan. Modelled after a Freedom Passover Seder held in 1969 as a part of an effort to build an interfaith, multi-racial coalition of civil rights activists, the Freedom Iftar brought together a group of Muslims and Jews to celebrate an Iftar together. Using ritual and prayer as a way of collectively visioning and embodying freedom futures.

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Coastal Resilience Tracker
Community Service Fellowship  
Department of Climate Resilience
@ City of Boston
2024

Developed and updated a GIS-based tracking systems-- a public-facing tools for monitoring the progress of coastal resilience projects from design through construction. 


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Leading user research for financial inclusion in Pakistan
User Research Lead
@ CreditBook Financial Services
2023

Led research planning and execution for multiple MSME user segments to uncover behavioral patterns, pain points, and opportunities across both digital interfaces and informal cash-based financial systems. 


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Contactless Payments in Pakistan
Customer Experience Designer
Digital Design Lab
@ United Bank Limited
2021

As a designer, I worked with business strategy teams to create a plan for users to find value in the experience in order to monetise the first-ever contactless payments product in the country. 

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Case Study: Khel Recreational Centre by Imkaan in Machar Colony
Final Year Thesis @ Habib University
Supervised by Dr Aaron Mulvany
2019

My research explores the importance of designing spaces for children that cater to play and recreation. The aim is to understand play and recreation as an aid to early childhood education but also as a human-right for children, especially children that are raised in urban-settings. Karachi as a megacity has few areas of recreation.

For my research in my undergraduate thesis, I conducted exploratory field observations and focus group discussions at Khel Recreational Centre. 

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making//designing


Karachi Kahaan[iyaan]
















COURSEAdvised by Marina Otero Verzier
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
2025

Maps are tools to engage with a city, for navigating infrastructure, bureaucratic bookkeeping, and surveillance. 

How do we change mapping to encompass cities that cannot be contained by maps?

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Timeline for Labour Organizing


















WORKSHOPReported to Dr Karilyn Crockett
Hacking the Archive
@ Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2025

A 30-foot timeline presented the ability to make dense archival data: accessible, interactive, and compelling. Participants from all walks of life interacted with the timeline by adding key dates, facts, and experiences in the history of organizing regarding labour and jobs in the Greater Boston area. 

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Contested Land Ecologies























EXHIBITION Collaboration with Klara Kaufman & nathalie attallah
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
2025

Contested Land Ecologies was a series of four collaborative workshops on ecology, environmental justice, publication design, and collaborative creative practice. Later, curated as an exhibition brought together student work from across the GSD into a printed publication, an installation of films and sound, and a series of workshops that expand on the theme.


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Counter Mapping Against the Void































COURSECollaboration with Natalie Phillips & Yiwen Huang
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2024


Palestine’s distinct relationship with the land wherein agriculture has been a key component for Palestinian culture and economy.  This relationship is also cemented by implementing a regime of bifurcating access to land and land use between Israeli and Palestinian settlements; sometimes even under the notion of security such as the apartheid wall in the West Bank. The buffer zone that has been implemented since November is an expansion of previous “No-Go Zones,” first established in 1993. In theses areas, soldiers may open fire on anyone who enters, regardless of if they’re a threat.


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Fiction of Containment: Runit Dome










 













COURSE + EXHIBITIONCollaboration with Klara Kaufman
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
2023

Through a critical annotation of the 1981 archival report by the Defense Nuclear Energy, "The Radiological Cleanup of Enewetak Atoll," we unpack historically situated imperialist logics. The exhibition takes the form of an exploded essay, "speaking back" to the dense 721-page document. A video projected over a hanging scroll juxtaposes archival footage of bombing and displacement and diagrams and texts with the purposeful density of the written report.

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