Spotlight.
Hanieh Khosroshahi
INTRODUCTION
Hanieh Khosroshahi (she/her) is an Iranian-Canadian design consultant, researcher, and community organiser working in pursuit of people and the planet. She designs products, services, programs, and experiences using participatory, feminist, and liberatory methods, centering care, lived experience, and codesign to imagine and build just futures. She is also the co-founder of Thousand&One, a global, feminist community that supports Women of Colour to thrive in their personal and professional lives.
INTERVIEW
How did you get into your creative practice? What initially inspired you?
My creative practice was inspired by my family upbringing and cultural background, where poetry and literature were artistic rituals and sites of memory and resistance. Drawn to storytelling from a young age, I began writing as a teenager before studying literature and visual arts, experimenting with photography, film, and mixed-media.
Over the past decade, my practice has shifted towards design as methodology, process, and output. Across every medium, the throughline has been using creative practice in pursuit of people and the planet.
What themes do you tend to interrogate in your creative practices?
My work is shaped by a commitment to gender equality, collective liberation, and social justice. Regardless of what I design a product, service, experience, or space my process wrestles with the intersections of knowledge, access, and power:
• What knowledge has been erased?
• Who is denied access?
• How do we re-distribute power?
I work predominantly with global majority communities and those on the margins, with a particular focus on women and young people, centring the codesign principle of "designing with, not for." Recurring themes include community and inclusion, the roles of grief, care, and hope, and collective imagination as a practice of resistance.
What is your favourite project you’ve ever worked on and why?
It's impossibly hard to name a favourite, but early in my career I had the privilege of working with the Together Project to design a prototype mobile tool helping Syrian refugee newcomers meet first-year settlement milestones in Canada. It was 2016, my first opportunity to apply participatory design methods to a social impact project, and a cause that I deeply cared about.
Our small team led interviews and interactive workshops with volunteers, stakeholders, and newcomers, creating journey maps that visualized the refugee experience during their first 12 months in Canada. The project produced a low-fidelity prototype tackling significant barriers like social isolation and access to services. It holds a special place in my heart and remains a defining milestone in how my career would unfold.
What advice would you have for creatives of colour looking to get into your creative practices?
Be open to the expansiveness of what "creative" means, and explore pathways you might not have considered. At the core of creative practice is curiosity about ourselves, how we relate to one another, and the planet we call home. Let that curiosity help you unlearn, grow, and evolve.
As creatives of colour specifically: relish in your power. Learn your history, lineage, and rituals. Celebrate your culture and traditions, and hold equal space for rage, hope, and joy. Find your people, never forsake your principles, and let the strength of your ancestors guide you we are here because of those who came before us, and we owe the same to those who come after.
What are you currently working on?
I'm kicking off a collaboration with Parents for Future Scotland to co-create a Glasgow Climate Charter with global majority communities with lived experience of migration. This summer, I'm launching nature walks in Glasgow with Thousand&One weaving together nature's healing benefits with community wellbeing. I'm also working on freelance projects spanning user experience and web design, research on gender-based violence, facilitation of monthly sharing spaces, and curriculum design on radical imagination for justice-centred futures. And I continue to battle my writer's block, hoping to finally finish my short story, By the Caspian.