As a human-centered design researcher Prof. Sawhney examines the critical role of technology, civic media, and urban interventions in contested spaces. He engages user experience design, participatory action research, sensory ethnography, and multi-modal (speech/audio) approaches for complex contexts of human-machine interaction. He has been conducting research at the intersection of AI and HCI for real-time news as well as humanitarian and crisis situations.

At Aalto University, Prof. Sawhney has embarked on a new research project on Reconstructing Crisis Narratives for Trustworthy Communication and Cooperative Agency. This research jointly conducted between Aalto University and THL proposes to analyze and reconstruct crisis narratives using mixed-methods, combining qualitative research for narrative inquiry with computational data analytics of crisis discourses in news and social media among diverse publics. The project plans to design tools and platforms representing and visualizing complex information to engage decision-makers, front-line responders, stakeholders, and the general public in making sense of crises and perceptions of risk and trust.