Somayeh is a seasoned Interaction Designer and Design Researcher who has worked with technology companies across the EU. She has expertise in Research through Design (RtD) and participatory methods within complex social ecosystems. Her educational background is in Interaction Design and Computer Science.

Somayeh’s PhD work is focused on designing health technologies that are beholders of illness experience and do not follow an extractive model that decontextualizes the lived realities of illness and its relational and situated ontologies. Drawing on narrative medicine and relational practices in indigenous knowledge, she is exploring how narratives of illness in advanced disease like cancer can be expressed through a web of relationality with human and non-human world. Her research sits at the intersection of HCI, Interaction Design, and Critical Design.

Prior to her PhD, Somayeh was part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie DCODE research programme, a collaboration between Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), TU Delft, and Leiden University Medical Center. Embedded in a cardiac care setting, she studied the emerging role of AI in remote patient monitoring through design ethnography, exploring how algorithmic systems reshape the relationships between patients, clinicians, and the experience of illness. This work became the ground for her doctoral research.