Sakib Jalil

Sakib Jalil’s career and life are a **meaningful mess**: consulting, research, teaching, cultures, cities, students, clients, and questions that kept pulling him in different directions, until he realised these are connected by one question: **what is design missing when it serves efficiency but forgets ethics, affection, connection, and joy?**

He is a **designer, consultant, researcher, and educator** whose career has grown through two streams: consulting and academic teaching. As a consultant, Sakib has worked in Australia since 2018 across user experience, service design, product strategy, digital transformation, and design-led discovery and delivery. His work has included roles with Telstra Purple and NCS Australia, as well as being part of cross-consulting teams with Deloitte and IBM. He has worked across telecommunications, digital health, government, education, and enterprise technology in product management, strategy, and service design.

As a researcher and educator, Dr Jalil holds a **PhD in Human-Computer Interaction**. Across research, teaching, and consulting, he has drawn on cognitive science, decision science, implementation science, qualitative research, ethnography, and emerging technologies to deliver practical outcomes. His work has consistently examined how people think, decide, feel, connect, and find meaning with technology. Some courses he teaches now are advanced interaction design, experience-centred design, ethics, and morals. Long before today’s AI boom, he explored interoperability between AI agents in 2010. This is now part of a longer concern with how technology becomes meaningful and humane for humankind, as individual and collective wellbeing need different perspectives.

His academic path has taken him through Thailand, Barcelona, Aalborg, California, and Australia, where he learned to **read design in everyday movement**: train stations, streets, classrooms, workplaces, and public spaces. Watching how people chose direction, hesitated, followed, adapted, and found their way showed him how deeply design can shape behaviour, emotion, and possibility. **Design is not a neutral profession; and it must be practised with great care.**

Sakib has had the opportunity to teach approximately **4,100 students**. He sees education as a symbiotic process: teaching students, and also learning from their questions, joys, life experiences, doubts, and ways of seeing the world. For him, these are **4,100 conversations** about technology, people, society, evidence, ethics, design, and the futures each generation wants to build.

Across consulting and academia, Sakib’s work returns to the same question: **what if design was judged not only by how efficiently it works, but by whether it acts ethically, understands its moral responsibilities, creates connection, and leaves room for joy?**