Heekyoung Jung, PhD

Present
Master of Design Program Director
Associate Professor of Interaction Design
2011-17 Assistant Professor
Ullman School of Design
College of DAAP / University of Cincinnati
2011  PhD Human-Computer Interaction Design / Indiana University Bloomington
2005 MS + 2003 BS Industrial Design / Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

Google Scholar  CV

Design for Future Creation

I cultivate aesthetic awareness of the diversity, complexity, and uncertainty of human experience amidst shifting paradigms of human-technology interaction. Building on my creative practice, my work extends design into a reflective, provocative and actionable mode of inquiry through the following areas of interest:

/ Design for Creative Practice
/ Hybrid Intelligent Systems
/ Computational Aesthetics
/ Travel in the Age of Artificial Experience
/ Theory and Reflection in Practice

Design (with) AI

My research investigates entangled views, tensions, and potentials in human-machine co-creation and reflection through design. It extends to explore what design can offer as methodology in this endeavor.

Design Studio Courses

Sophomore / Computational Aesthetics Prejunior / Interaction Design 2
Junior /  Intelligent System Design
Graduate /  Research Methods Thesis + Dissertation Advising
/ Design Methods + Processes + Tools
/ Design System + System Design
/ Experience + Interface Design
/ Visual Abstraction + Imagination
/ More-than-Human Centered Design

Design for Creative Practice

How can artistic creation support self-expression, reflection, and growth in the margin of current self-tracking apps? My research promotes everyday creativity and inspiration through algorithmic or expert guidance in digital communication platforms. CHI’22  DIS’21

Typographic diffraction of the meaning of A.I. by breaking and layering words, using Processing (2023)

Typographic abstraction of the NYTimes article (2021)
“The shape of knowing becomes the shape of our growing.”

ARTCAN Teens is an app-based digital art therapy progra that is developed by team: Heekyoung Jung, Claudia Rebola, and Meghan Sawyer (2023). Dr. Soma Sengupta will lead an empirical evaluation study in the Department of Neurology at the Uni. of NC-Chapel Hill (2024).

Intelligent System Design for Human-Machine Collaboration

This collaborative studio extends the current UX/UI design approach to automated and AI-enabled systems. Beyond optimizing workflows to increase efficiency, we envision new modes of work that is augmented by human-machine collaboration, speculating about their un/intended consequences. 

Yibo Jao’s MDes Thesis project, “UX Design Approach to Guide Parametric Product Customization,” was presented at IASDR 2023 in Milan, Italy. (Chair: Heekyoung Jung; Committee: Alejandro Lozano Robledo, Brigid O'Kane)

A student group project, “GardenSpace with Eden,” was selected as one of the 24 finalists in  2023 IxDA Awards.

Crown Equipment sponsored to design safe and smart lift truck training systems. Our research and design outcomes were presented at SEGD 2016 in Seattle.

Computational Aesthetics

This studio course introduces the history, concepts, and skills for procedural sketching, parametric variations, and generative visual systems. Students engage with the gestalt theory of perception, studying variable shapes and their interactions through coded repetition, randomization, and transformation. 

Maria Langdon (2023)

Grace Nunn (2023)

Gracie Siemer (2023)

Travel in the Age of Artificial Experience

As part of research on creative reflection, I organized a sensory retreat workshop in a traveling artists' residency in Iceland. I analyzed the participants’ traces of wandering from their notes and sketches to understand how being somewhere evokes and generates creative inspiration. CHI’20

This study leads to questions about what it means to travel today when we are virtually everywhere and experience vicariously through artificial presence.

While the design possibilities for new technologies seem endless in theory, the ways to explore some technologies, such as AI, are still limited in studio practice.

Beyond following normative design theories or methods, I identify hidden actors in design and make sense of the complex interactions that emerge from them.

This reflective practice advances individual and collective design knowledge that is resilient to the uncertainty, instability, and friction in the evolving design environment.

My work expands design as a mode of speculative inquiry to reveal, reassess, and reconfigure the entangled relationships between humans and other actors, including technology.

Three-Dimensional Color Composition: Paper folded on a mirror unfolds unexpected shapes through reflection. (1998)