Design Seminars 2026 Fall

In this seminar, I want to share what I have learned from using AI in my own research from designing prototypes to working with qualitative and quantitative data. This is not intended as a guide to the “right” way to use AI in research, but rather as a reflection on my own experiments, mistakes, useful practices, and unresolved questions. Along the way, I will discuss how I have tried to work with AI while maintaining my own judgment and agency as a researcher. I hope my seminar to open up the conversation and exchange our experiences and perspectives on what it means to research with AI.

Yungu Kang is a doctoral researcher at UNIST’s OND Lab, where he explores UX, digital services, and human-centered design research. His master’s research examined codesign between parents and children in smartphone management, with a focus on active mediation and family relationships.

Just as every object we use is created based on a designer’s blueprint, modern society is built upon the vast framework of “law.” However, many people find the law vague and difficult to understand, and they go about their lives indifferent to it—only to be deeply shocked when they are suddenly caught up in an unexpected dispute or fall victim to fraud. In this lecture, we’ll provide an easy-to-understand introduction to the practical, basic legal knowledge you absolutely must know, and explore ways to protect your hard-earned money. Furthermore, this session will offer a glimpse into the potential ways your academic expertise could become a tool for preventing crime in the future.

Sooyon Cho is an Associate Professor at the HUFS Law School. She studied industrial design at KAIST, law at Korea University, and counseling psychology at Hanseo University, and served in the Korean judiciary from 2008 to 2025, including as a presiding judge.

We are currently building a startup from an industrial designer’s perspective, after graduating with their B.S. and M.S. degrees from the UNIST Department of Design. While high initial costs often make people hesitate to launch product-based ventures, designers can actually start a business and bring their vision to life with minimal capital. Having taken those first steps and moving forward, the two founders share their early-stage journey of turning design concepts into a real business.

Minji Kim and Jaehyeok Oh are UNIST-trained industrial designers whose work spans hardware product development, UX, and generative AI. Both contributed to the development of ROLI Airwave, alongside projects in mobility, consumer products, and emerging technologies.

How can participatory design help create just and sustainable futures? In the seminar, I will explain what participatory design is and how it can contribute to sustainability transitions. As an example, I will share my doctoral research project, which received distinction from Aalto University. My research project named Making Energy Together explores how participatory design can help school communities in collaboratively build energy devices and collectively participating in energy transitions.

Goeun Kuu-Park is a design researcher focusing on participatory design and sustainability transitions. She studied Industrial Design at Konkuk University and later earned her Doctor of Arts from Aalto University. Her research on participatory design, community energy, and material engagement has been published in leading journals including CoDesign and Energy Research & Social Science.

How can a user-centered design approach influence a space? We discuss a new kind of design that drives innovation across the spectrum of space – people – and content.
A different process leads to a different outcome. Discover success cases in space and content created through user-centered design approaches.

Esther Lee is the Founder and CEO of WIO Labs and an innovation consultant specializing in UX, co-design, and design thinking. She previously worked at SAP AppHaus Asia, Cheil Worldwide, d’strict, and 2B Interactive, and has led user-centered design projects for children’s and youth libraries.

Why is imagining multiple futures important to people and society? How can it be enacted within codesign workshop settings? What are the opportunities and challenges of design tools in the process? Centered on these questions, my research has focused on the intersection of civic agency, futures studies, and design for policy. In this seminar, I will share the key insights and reflections gained from the design projects I have conducted since joining the Design Department at UNIST.

Hyori Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Design at UNIST and a member of New Design Studio. Her research explores how design and futures thinking can strengthen civic agency and support more sustainable societies, particularly through participatory futuring and design for policy. Her research on participatory futuring for sustainability transitions has been published in the International Journal of Design.

Design exceeds mere function—its beauty often resides in the surplus that emerges between ends and means: sensory awareness, hesitation, judgment, care, and affect. Rather than intervening explicitly, design can work quietly within this in-between, letting meaning and experience unfold through interaction. The Kind Ghost imagines such a design: unobtrusive yet attentive, quietly supporting users without demanding anything of them. This seminar explores how design might cultivate such surplus as a source of beauty—reconsidering the seemingly unnecessary as a generative condition for human experience.

Jooyoung Jung is a faculty member in Design Engineering at KoreaTech whose work spans product aesthetics, UX-based smart products, sustainable design, and 3D printing. She studied Integrated Product Design at TU Delft and has worked internationally in product development and design research.

Technology is becoming increasingly personalized, yet much of it is used in contexts shared by multiple people. This talk looks at intelligent agents within the home as a shared living environment and draws on doctoral research on agents that support everyday family coordination. Drawing on experiences across design practice, industry, and academia, the talk also reflects on how this research invites us to rethink “the user” and “personalization.”

Yoomi Lee is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at Hongik University. Her research focuses on human-centered experiences with emerging technologies such as AI and IoT, with particular attention to social relationships. She studied design at Seoul National University, Carnegie Mellon University, and KAIST, and has worked across industry and academia at LG Electronics, Microsoft, Samsung Electronics, and Kyungil University.

Designers usually have two paths: go broad and become a generalist, or go narrow and get very good at one thing. AI has made both harder. Broad, and you are up against a model that knows more than you ever will. Narrow, and you are up against one built to do your exact job. This seminar argues the remaining ground is the seam between the two, and works through what that means in practice for anyone choosing what to learn next.

Danyal Sarfraz is a designer and researcher working at the intersection of spatial computing, AI, and human-centered product design. He earned a master’s in Engineering Design from UNIST, focusing on XR and human–robot interaction, and a bachelor’s in Industrial Design from NUST.

Practice of how an imagined futures can be made tangible, held, revisited, and slowly made ordinary, from South Asia.

Alifiya Mutaher and Dhaval Kothari are design researchers and futures practitioners at Lagori Collective. Their work combines participatory research, foresight, and cultural inquiry to explore systems change and possible futures, grounded in long-term engagements with communities and institutions across South Asia and beyond.

Design research inherently involves both theoretical understanding and practical intervention. Yet in practice, researchers often treat the two as separate endeavors rather than mutually informing processes. Drawing on the principles of design science, this seminar explores how theory and practice co-evolve to generate design knowledge. Using the development of the Scenario-Oriented Specification (SOS) method as a case study, the seminar demonstrates how a design problem identified in practice evolved into a theoretically grounded design method through iterative cycles of problem framing, method development, and empirical evaluation. It further examines how theorizing emerges from this iterative process, transforming design interventions into broader scholarly knowledge. The seminar concludes with reflections on the broader research lessons emerging from my PhD journey.

Ulugbek Ismatullaev is a Ph.D. candidate researching design methodology, UX, and scenario-based approaches to early-stage product development. His work explores how user scenarios and UX insights can be translated into engineering specifications to improve collaboration between designers and engineers.