This project began in 2019 as a side project and became the center of my dissertation. I led a cross-functional team of friends, engineers and designers in Korea, through multiple rebuilds and a four-week live deployment.

WhoAmI Today features like daily prompts, private comments, and emoji reactions were designed to scaffold low-stakes self-disclosure and genuine reciprocation rather than performance. The experimental version achieved 70% retention (rare for social computing research) and showed that intentional design can reshape how users perceive and enact social media behavior.

We are currently developing revisions based on findings from the first deployment, with a second deployment planned for February 2025.

I founded Positech during my first year while searching for belonging. It began as a small circle of peers; it has since grown into a network of 20+ researchers across 10+ institutions. Our community has produced three workshops (2024, 2025, 2026 tentative), with a methodology paper and course syllabus in development.

In 2020, I co-founded the K-HCI Roundtable to sustain connection among Korean HCI scholars across borders, a weekly gathering of 20+ members that continues today.

“Social media” is a loaded term. When asked to redesign it, youth often reproduce what they already know: a cleaner Instagram, better moderation. The term itself anchors imagination to existing failures.

I conducted co-design interviews with 23 participants (ages 15–24). Rather than redesigning social media, they imagined how they would want to connect with other wizards if they were students at Hogwarts. This reframing empowered them to use language they were more familiar with (3D games, magical worlds) and served as a translation layer between youth desires and adult design vocabulary.

Freed from constraints, participants envisioned social connection as immersive neighborhoods rather than content feeds: spaces for presence, shared activity, and low-pressure co-presence. Several said the session made them hopeful about the future of online connection for the first time.

In prior co-design work, design principles came from sessions with teens, but actual features were designed by researchers. This created a disconnect between what youth wanted and what we built. I wanted to involve them more frequently and directly.

I created a Discord server to establish ongoing collaboration with teens who want to shape what social media becomes. Using the Asynchronous Remote Community method, participants engage in needs assessment, collaborative ideation, and feedback on prototypes. An AI-facilitated bot supports discussion so teens can share freely.

While this project is in progress, 15 youth have already volunteered to join without any incentives.

Much social computing research focuses on mitigating harm. This workshop asked: what if we designed proactively for flourishing?

This was the first workshop to emerge from the Positech community, held at CSCW 2024.* It sparked discussions about what it means to center positivity and care in technology research, and drew new members into our growing network.

*CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) is a flagship venue for social computing research.

Cynicism and fear-based narratives dominate how we talk about technology and society. It is easy to feel like individuals are powerless against systemic problems. The Hogwarts study showed me something different: participants left sessions feeling hopeful about social media’s future for the first time.

Hope, as defined in hope theory, is not naïve optimism. It involves reframing problems into meaningful goals and identifying concrete pathways, small steps you can actually take. This workshop, held at CSCW 2025, brought together researchers to ask how design might cultivate that capacity.

Several participants from the 2024 workshop returned as organizers.

I collaborated on a project examining climate content on social media and its relationship to youth mental health (paper). That work made me realize how social media can feed alarmist narratives, but also how it might be designed to support sustained care without burning people out.

Social media exposes teens to endless crisis: climate doom, political despair, global suffering. But it can also connect them to others who care, surface good news, and offer concrete pathways for action. This workshop asks how we design for sustainable care: engagement that persists without exhaustion.

Nine past participants and organizers have already volunteered to join as co-organizers for this workshop.

I mentor students the way I collaborate: prioritizing their growth, giving them meaningful work. A master’s student I mentored became a key designer on WhoAmI Today; another became a PhD student still working with me. I also mentor a high school student exploring how social media supports identity development in queer youth. These relationships last because people feel they matter.

As a TA for Quantitative Methods (INSC 571), I tried to approach the role with a supportive stance. The course is demanding, and some students come in with no quantitative background. They take the class alongside peers with strong statistics training, and some end up feeling inadequate. The most fulfilling part of this work was seeing those students, the ones who initially lacked confidence, make it through the quarter. Emotional support and believing in them made a difference.