Heekyoung Jung, PhD

Master of Design Program Director
Associate Professor of Interaction Design
Ullman School of Design / College of DAAP / University of Cincinnati

Curriculum Vitae (2024)
Google Scholar

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:

/ Futuring through Co-Speculation

/ Design for Creative Practice
/ Hybrid Intelligent Systems
/ Travel through Sensory Engagement
/ Theory and Reflection in Practice

Design (with) AI ︎In particular, I investigate entangled views, tensions, and potentials in human-machine co-creation and reflection through design, exploring what design can offer as methodology in this endeavor.

Design Studio Courses

Sophomore
︎Computational Aesthetics
Prejunior
︎Interaction Design
Junior
︎Intelligent System Design
Graduate
︎Design Issues focusing on XR and AI
︎Research Methods
Thesis + Dissertation Advising
︎Design Methods + Tools
︎Design System + System Design
︎Interface + Experience Design

Futuring through Co-Speculation

How to engage multiple stakeholders in futuring the urban life engtangled with diverse actors? What design can offer as methodology to speculate about more-than-human views? What role immersive and generative media can take in co-speculation?

Future of Mobility reconnecting people, ideas, and goods in Cincinnati 2050
Images created by Nathan Weber using Midjourney

I organize a design challenge to envision the future of mobility with AI for urban wellbeing in collaboration with the City Science Lab at MIT Media Lab, the Future Mobility Lab at University of Cincinnati, and the UX studio Irvine of Hyundai America Tech Center (HATCI).
Design Challenge’ 24 in Cincinnati ︎︎︎

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

Variable shapes using p5js in the Computational Aesthetics class (Student work by Gracie Siemer, 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 program 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).

Human-Machine Collaboration + Hacking Intelligence

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.

Travel through Sensory Engagement

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.

Theory and Reflection in Practice

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)

Design Theory in Practice
Heekyoung Jung, PhD

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