The Pattu Border

In South Indian silk sarees, the pattu border is the ornate woven edge — temples, peacocks, elephants — each motif carrying generations of meaning.

When I first walked into a saree shop in India, the shopkeeper explained every detail: the weight of the silk signals the occasion, the width of the border marks formality, the motifs connect to regional identity. A masterclass in human-centered design.

This stripe is a tribute to that craft — a reminder that the best design communicates richness through thoughtful detail.

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Sai Siddartha Maram

Design Researcher at Xbox · Engineer & Designer

PhD in HCI, UC Santa Cruz · Previously at Meta · Invento Robotics

Work

AI tools for research

Internship Project

Xbox · Microsoft NDA

AURA: Agentic User Research

Xbox couldn't interview players in Brazil, Vietnam, or Poland. Wrong timezones, no local vendors. I built 4 AI capabilities into one platform. Same team, 3 continents, 8 hours back per study.

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LLM × Design

Ooha: AI Canvas

Every AI chat tool makes you commit to one idea. I built a spatial canvas where you branch prompts and run GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini side by side. Teams generated 340% more directions before picking one.

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LLM × Research

Cursor Research

The bottleneck isn't the interview. It's the hours you spend cutting transcripts before any real analysis begins. Built an AI tool that does it 73% faster while keeping the researcher in control of every cut.

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BJET 2025

TGP: Gamified Prompts

Co-designed 60 gamified prompts with educators, mapped them into 19 mechanics. When teachers used the taxonomy, student immersion tripled (2.2 to 5.2) and design time dropped 63%.

CHI '24

Game Play Reflection Systems

Students playing an educational game were generating rich data that never came back to them. 21 months of iteration to build a visualization that turns gameplay logs into reflection: from passive play to comparing your own strategies.

Design for people the industry overlooks

ACM DIS '25 — Best Paper

Shloka: Climate Action Games

Players couldn't roleplay harming nature. It violated ritual purity. So I rebuilt the mechanics around protection. 4 months of fieldwork at Tirumala and Sabarimala. 87% higher immersion. Five temples now piloting it.

CHI PLAY '24

Religious Inclusivity in Games

NLP topic modeling on 10,000+ Reddit posts. The finding flipped the assumed wisdom: religious players don't want religion kept out of games. They want it done right. That distinction became design guidelines.

ACM FDG '23

AstraVerse Character Design

Spent months photographing 4 temples, cataloguing 429 artifacts. Distilled them into 141 remixable elements game designers can use to build Hindu-inspired characters without copying any deity. Now used in Star Wars Eclipse.

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Best Seller

Tales of Dharma

Designed for grandparents and grandchildren who don't share a language or cultural frame. Hindu mythology as storytelling prompts. Top 10 card games for 10 weeks. Players said it brought them closer to their culture than any class had.

Internship Project

About

I grew up between cultures: Telugu at home, English at school, Hindu mythology at bedtime, video games on weekends. That gap is where most of my research lives. I keep finding the same problem: tools and systems that assume a default user who doesn't match the person in front of me. My work is usually an attempt to close that gap, whether it's a climate game that speaks to someone's grandmother or a research platform that doesn't require a bilingual vendor to hear from players in Vietnam.

I have a PhD in HCI from UC Santa Cruz, spent time at Meta building new generative research methods, and most recently did an internship at Xbox designing AI tooling for their global research team. The through-line across all of it is the same question: who is the system actually designed for, and what do they need that it isn't giving them yet?

Reach me at msaisiddartha1@gmail.com

Sai Siddartha Maram

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