Nidhi Chaudhary is an Associate Professor (Teaching) in Development, Innovation and Technology Policy and Director of Education at the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP), UCL.

She is the founder and academic lead of UCL STEaPP’s Co-Design Lab, which aims to extend UCL’s policy impact and engagement with local councils and community organisations to embed co-design and co-production into approaches addressing diverse policy issues.

She has over 15 years of work experience in academia, consulting and government organisations in India and the UK. This has enabled her to engage with policy makers/practitioners at a senior level and has provided insights into issues affecting the planning, design and delivery of public policy. Along with these policy initiatives, she also advises high tech start-ups on their commercialisation and business strategy.

Nidhi’s current research centres on policy co-design, development and evaluation, place-based approaches, working directly with communities to empower decision-makers and receive community buy-in in local government initiatives and engagement activities.

Please tell us about your role:

I have set up the Co-Design Lab at UCL in 2025 which aims to facilitate dialogue across diverse backgrounds and needs and extend UCL’s policy impact and engagement with local councils and community organisations to embed co-design based creative practices into approaches addressing diverse policy issues.

The Lab brings together trans-disciplinary expertise from different faculties in UCL and acts as a lynchpin for strengthening UCL policy partnerships with local governments/
organisations and communities using co-design and grounds-up participatory approaches using the ‘contextualised’ collective needs and diverse knowledge of citizens with ‘lived’ experience.

What was your journey into the arts…..

Visual arts and its different forms have been part of my life since childhood almost as an escape route from the intensive studying which is an inherent part of the Indian education system! I am now a trained architect and an institutional economist. My approach is trans-disciplinary and draws from economics, art, architecture, engineering and social sciences and is informed by more than 15 years of external engagement experience of working in academia, governments and industry in India and the UK on policy design, implementation and evaluation, public participation and community engagement, public sector reforms, and urban development and innovation systems.

What inspires you….

What currently inspires me is how we can use creative co-design practices as an approach to reimagine data, community empowerment, or creative policymaking, to shape our cities and societies for the better. It is also about how we provide safe and creative spaces to celebrate the trans-disciplinarity in expression of thought, culture and creativity, locally and within our societies to address and tackle complex societal challenges, where we can envisage positive futures for our societies and cities by introducing the importance of human ‘lived’ and ‘unlived’ experience and perspectives thus reducing power imbalance in whose voices are considered important and ‘heard’.

How does your experience contribute to CVAN London, and what are your ambitions for the London network…

I have been really fortunate to work with CVAN London and DACS on a project where we took an artist-centric approach to think about how generative AI (GenAI) is transforming the way we ‘cultivate’ and ‘guard’ creativity’ given it might be viewed as a reductive exercise for machine learning rather than the emotions, narratives and human stories which are intrinsic to creative work. As such the project enabled us to use co-design as a practice to create a knowledge sharing space exploring how artists and creative practitioners experience generative AI, what emotions are at play, and how we might co-design fairer, more transparent futures for creative work in an AI-driven world.

This project was awarded by UCL Art Futures and CoSTAR Foresight Lab Creative IP programme using funding by the AHRC Impact Acceleration Account.

What are you currently working on and what does the future hold…..

I am currently working on a number of interesting research and policy practice projects in UCL STEaPP’s Co-Design Lab where the ethos is about using co-design as a practice, some of which are mentioned below:
I have been awarded an Arts Council England grant, which evaluates the impact of its ‘Priority Places Programme’ on creation of culture and creative spaces using Croydon as a
pilot case study.

I also lead on a project with Waltham Forest, “Dream, Design, Do: Building Tomorrow’s Jobs with Today’s Youth”, to explore how co-design as an approach can support young people’s employment aspirations (particularly underserved groups) through creating sustainable partnerships in emerging and future-focused sectors such as Creative/Digital andTechnology and Construction/Green Jobs.

I am also working with Newham Council on evaluation of its People Powered Places Programme and with Hammersmith and Fulham Council on understanding the Creative &
Cultural Ecologies in Hammersmith & Fulham.