JaeWon Kim

#HCI, #social computing, #social media, #youth, #usable privacy, #design

Hi! I’m JaeWon. I design and build relationally supportive social media: online spaces with enough psychological safety that young people can experiment with interpersonal dynamics and grow into resilient adults, equipped with the social connections and interpersonal trust they need to navigate the world. I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Washington Information School (ABD), and I expect to graduate in May 2027.

Research and policy on youth social media mostly aim at preventing harm; my dissertation asks how platform design could actively support young people’s friendships instead. It rests on one claim: teens do what seems normal on a platform, not what they individually want, so design has to change a platform’s norms, not leave the burden of change to each user. Norms also limit what teens can imagine: ask them for better social media and they mostly tweak Instagram so it harms them less.

So my studies take existing apps off the table and let youth envision hopeful alternatives: they think metaphorically (“connecting through magic with remote wizards” rather than “social media experiences”), decide together what “better” social media should mean and how to measure it, and watch designs play out among LLM agents modeled on themselves and people they know. It all builds toward a design framework for friendship-supportive social media, a map of what a platform must provide for young people to form, deepen, and sustain the friendships they seek.

To put these findings to the test, I built my own social media platform, WhoamI Today (WIT) (public beta coming soon), and deployed it with 99 youth across Korea and the US in 2025. A second deployment, redesigned around what the first one taught me, is underway now. Papers on this work are in preparation; in the meantime, here’s a video tour.

Because interpersonal dynamics online are entangled with so much else, my work also spans usable privacy and spatial and embodied interaction, including trust-enabled privacy (SOUPS ‘25) and designs that reduce teens’ dysfunctional privacy fears (CSCW ‘25).

Beyond the dissertation, a few things that keep me going:

• Positech: a community I founded, where researchers navigate hard social computing problems, and day-to-day research life, through community and care.
• Designing Social Media Futures: an undergraduate course I created at UW, which I’m teaching for the first time this fall.
• Offline: you can find me singing, daydreaming, and slowly running, biking, and swimming toward a someday-triathlon (emphasis on “slowly”).