Researcher and maker. Working at the edge of what language can carry.

I’m Megha Goel, a UX researcher with 7+ years of practice across AI, culture, and cross-cultural communication — and a maker of objects, installations, and language experiments that ask the same questions differently.

This site holds both. Silence is the thread.

My work lives at the intersection of AI systems, cultural meaning, and the limits of representation.
I'm a senior UX researcher with seven years of experience working with companies like Google, Spotify, and Meta -- leading language and AI research across 20+ countries, in contexts where what the system doesn't understand has real consequences. See working ->

The questions that drive me are older and stranger than any job title: what does a system learn when it learns from us? What does it miss? And who pays for that gap?

I run experiments that make those questions concrete. I asked an AI to reconstruct me from our conversation history alone. What it produced said more about the defaults built into the system than anything it had learned about me. That's not a glitch. It's an argument about what intelligence is being built to see. See investigating ->

I also build things. if-words-were-enough.org is a living archive that stress-tests AI on culturally-loaded, untranslatable words — the kind of meaning that doesn't survive encoding. It won the Creativity Prize at the Global Dialogues Challenge. It's also a dataset. See making ->

My writing lives at Lately About — on noticing things before they have words. See newsletter ->

When I am not working, I am pointing a flash at my friends, ranking a new restaurant on beli, or trying to revive my sourdough starter for the tenth time (or complaining about the weather).

I'm based in New York. I came here from India, via Seattle, and have degrees in English and HCI from Univerity of Washington and Interactive Telecommunications from NYU's ITP.

In Hindi, my name means clouds.

Research as a way of paying attention

7+ years of UX Research Experience working with Big Tech companies. Here are a few examples:

Happy to provide detailed case studies on each project listed and more. Please email me for a secure link.