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 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

︎Computational Aesthetics / sophomore generative design studio
︎Interaction Design / pre-junior communication design studio course
︎Intelligent System Design / junior collaborative studio
︎Design Issues + Research Methods / graduate core courses
︎Thesis + Dissertation Advising / internally and externally

Futuring through Speculation

In this collaborative project, we speculate about the futures of urban mobility by reimagining vehicles as an interface between humans and the environment through history and creative media storytelling.

I co-organized this design challenge to envision the future of mobility in collaboration with the UX studio Irvine of Hyundai America Tech Center (HATCI), the City Science Lab at MIT Media Lab, School of Design and the Future Mobility Lab at University of Cincinnati.
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.

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)