Teaching Experience
Teaching Experience
Lecturer
Designing for Sustainability | The University of Texas at Austin, Spring 2025
I led this five-week course focused on sustainable design principles, material innovation, and circular economy strategies. Through hands-on projects, discussions, and case studies, students explored how design can contribute to ecological, social, and economic sustainability. The course encouraged students to think critically about the environmental impact of design and equipped them with practical tools for sustainable innovation.
Teaching Assistant
The University of Texas at Austin, 2023 – 2025 |
As a Teaching Assistant in the MFA in Design program, I have supported courses that cover a wide range of design disciplines:
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Interaction Design — Guided students in human-centered design, user experience (UX), and digital interface design through prototyping and testing.
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2D Design — Taught principles of visual composition, typography, and communication, with an emphasis on foundational graphic design skills.
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Design History — Facilitated discussions on historical design movements, cultural influences, and emerging trends in design practice.
-
3D Design — Supported projects focused on material exploration, form-making, and spatial design, encouraging both physical and digital fabrication.
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Portfolio & Performance Review — Mentored students on portfolio development, professional presentation, and career strategy, helping them craft strong and cohesive personal narratives.
Workshops Led
Embodied Movement for Multispecies Empathy | ISEA2025, Seoul, Korea
An interactive workshop exploring how designers can cultivate multispecies empathy through embodied engagementand movement-based methods.
Exploring Deer’s Umwelt to Design for Coexistence | School of Architecture, UT Austin, 2025
Participants explored deer sensory perception and applied these insights to rethinking urban and architectural spacesfor human-wildlife coexistence.
Creating with Bioplastics | UT Austin, 2024
A hands-on workshop where participants experimented with biodegradable materials, learning bioplastic mixing and mold-making techniques.
Exploring Embodied Movement in Design | UT Austin, 2024
Introduced movement-based methods to expand designers’ understanding of body awareness, space, and sensory experience.
Designing Through a Dog’s Umwelt | UT Austin, 2024 | NYU Game Center, 2024
An immersive workshop where participants embodied aspects of canine sensory experience to design dog-friendly environments, toys, and interactions.
Designing Through a Pigeon’s World | UT Austin, 2024
Explored the city through a pigeon’s perspective, inspiring urban interventions and cohabitation strategies for multispecies design.
Teaching Philosophy
I am endlessly curious about the world. I believe there is always something new to discover, and nothing makes me happier than diving into unfamiliar territories, exploring ideas, and bringing them back to share with others. I find meaning in both learning and sharing: I love learning interactively with students, and I also value the role of the teacher as an explorer who gathers knowledge and returns to inspire and empower others. This spirit of curiosity, openness, and joy drives my teaching. I approach learning as an adventure—sometimes structured, sometimes playful—always seeking to understand more and imagine new possibilities. I strive to create a classroom environment that is positive, collaborative, and alive with questions, where we can challenge assumptions, embrace uncertainty, and support one another’s creative growth. I encourage a speculative mindset, where students question what exists and explore alternatives. Knowledge is not static; it must be analyzed, reinterpreted, and reshaped. By fostering lifelong curiosity, I help students make interdisciplinary connections and push beyond conventional boundaries. While structure provides guidance, rigidity can hinder creativity. I encourage adaptive problem-solving, helping students navigate complexity with confidence. In group projects, I rotate roles to stretch comfort zones and foster cross-disciplinary collaboration. I see design as a form of research and inquiry, requiring rigor, historical understanding, and experimentation. But education is not only about personal growth—it is also about recognizing our social and ecological impact. I challenge students to think critically about social responsibility, sustainability, and ethics in design. I value a non-hierarchical, inclusive learning environment where ideas can be exchanged freely. I adapt my approach to meet diverse learning styles, and aim to build collaborative studio cultures that encourage both individual reflection and collective exploration. Feedback is key to growth. In critiques, I separate ideas from people—I aim to be tough on ideas but kind to students. I emphasize constructive, solution-oriented feedback, encouraging both self-evaluation and peer learning. Above all, I value learning by doing—integrating interactive, physical, and experimental methods to keep students engaged. More than teaching skills, my goal is to equip students with the confidence, adaptability, and critical perspective needed to navigate their careers and contribute meaningfully to the world.
Research and Teaching Interest
Multispecies Design and Ecological Perspectives
Interspecies empathy and world-sharing, movement-based and embodied design methods, co-creation with non-human systems, urban wildlife coexistence, multispecies urbanism, citizen science for urban ecologies, embodied environmental sensing, public engagement and research communication.
Art, Activism, and Research-Based Practice
Art as activism, research-based art and design, speculative and critical design, environmental art and climate justice, experiential media, multimodal installations, interactive projection and performance, embodied experience and sensorium, spatial and public space design.
Urbanism, Systems Thinking, and Sustainable Design
Urban design, public space design, systems thinking in ecological design, urban planning for multispecies coexistence, data visualization, data art, participatory design, co-creation, sustainable materials, circular design, industrial design methods, material innovation, translating scientific knowledge through design, explorative design for emerging technologies.
Technology, Media, and Ethics
Ethics of emerging technologies, media and society, philosophy of AI, surveillance, gender and capitalism in digital culture, climate change communication through design and art, attention and perception in digital and physical environments.
Interaction, HCI, and Prototyping
HCI principles, interaction design, prototyping (low- to high-fidelity, physical and digital), physical computing, digital fabrication (laser cutting, 3D printing, CNC), generative design, UX/UI design, responsive web and mobile design, branding, typography, visual communication, game design, playful interaction.
Lecturer
Designing for Sustainability | The University of Texas at Austin, Spring 2025
I led this five-week course focused on sustainable design principles, material innovation, and circular economy strategies. Through hands-on projects, discussions, and case studies, students explored how design can contribute to ecological, social, and economic sustainability. The course encouraged students to think critically about the environmental impact of design and equipped them with practical tools for sustainable innovation.
Teaching Assistant
The University of Texas at Austin, 2023 – 2025 |
As a Teaching Assistant in the MFA in Design program, I have supported courses that cover a wide range of design disciplines:
-
Interaction Design — Guided students in human-centered design, user experience (UX), and digital interface design through prototyping and testing.
-
2D Design — Taught principles of visual composition, typography, and communication, with an emphasis on foundational graphic design skills.
-
Design History — Facilitated discussions on historical design movements, cultural influences, and emerging trends in design practice.
-
3D Design — Supported projects focused on material exploration, form-making, and spatial design, encouraging both physical and digital fabrication.
-
Portfolio & Performance Review — Mentored students on portfolio development, professional presentation, and career strategy, helping them craft strong and cohesive personal narratives.
Workshops Led
Embodied Movement for Multispecies Empathy | ISEA2025, Seoul, Korea
An interactive workshop exploring how designers can cultivate multispecies empathy through embodied engagementand movement-based methods.
Exploring Deer’s Umwelt to Design for Coexistence | School of Architecture, UT Austin, 2025
Participants explored deer sensory perception and applied these insights to rethinking urban and architectural spacesfor human-wildlife coexistence.
Creating with Bioplastics | UT Austin, 2024
A hands-on workshop where participants experimented with biodegradable materials, learning bioplastic mixing and mold-making techniques.
Exploring Embodied Movement in Design | UT Austin, 2024
Introduced movement-based methods to expand designers’ understanding of body awareness, space, and sensory experience.
Designing Through a Dog’s Umwelt | UT Austin, 2024 | NYU Game Center, 2024
An immersive workshop where participants embodied aspects of canine sensory experience to design dog-friendly environments, toys, and interactions.
Designing Through a Pigeon’s World | UT Austin, 2024
Explored the city through a pigeon’s perspective, inspiring urban interventions and cohabitation strategies for multispecies design.
Teaching Philosophy
My teaching philosophy is grounded in curiosity, empathy, and critical inquiry. I view design education as a space of shared discovery, where students learn not only technical skills but also how to question assumptions, connect ideas across disciplines, and imagine new futures. My goal as an educator is to cultivate lifelong learners who are confident, adaptable, and ethically aware, designers who approach complexity with creativity, care, and a sense of responsibility toward both people and the environment.
Although I am still early in my academic teaching career, I have been engaged in teaching and mentoring in various forms for many years. My experiences as a teaching assistant, instructor, and workshop facilitator have deeply shaped how I understand learning. These experiences have taught me that teaching is both structured and exploratory. Clear frameworks provide direction, but meaningful learning happens through experimentation and reflection. In my classes and workshops, we move between making, observing, and discussing, connecting embodied experience with conceptual thinking. I encourage students to work iteratively, testing and refining ideas to understand that design is not only about producing outcomes but about thinking through making. Curiosity, intuition, and imagination are treated not as luxuries, but as essential design methods.
I create learning environments that balance individual reflection and collective exchange. While some students thrive in collaboration, others need space for solitude and introspection. I design courses and workshops that provide both, creating opportunities for collaboration when it strengthens communication, empathy, and shared inquiry, while also leaving room for independent projects that honor personal pace, perspective, and experimentation. Multimodal learning, through movement, material, language, or digital tools, allows students to engage through their own sensory and cognitive strengths. This balance encourages both confidence and interdependence.
Accessibility and inclusion are foundational to my teaching. Students learn and express themselves in different ways, and my role is to make those differences visible and valued. I use strategies such as anonymous prompts, reflective writing, or multimodal critiques to ensure that quieter or less confident voices contribute meaningfully. I see critique as a form of dialogue rather than evaluation, an invitation to share and question. My guiding principle is simple: be rigorous with ideas, gentle with people.
Design, to me, is a research practice, a way of understanding the world through material, sensory, and conceptual exploration. I guide students to investigate the social, ecological, and ethical dimensions of their work, encouraging them to think beyond human-centered perspectives toward systems of coexistence. I want them to see that design can be both poetic and practical, capable of revealing new relationships between technology, the body, and the environment.
Teaching, like design, is a continual process of learning and adaptation. Each class or workshop becomes a testing ground for new methods, technologies, and ways of thinking. I revise my materials and examples regularly, informed by student feedback and my ongoing research in embodied and multispecies design. Ultimately, my goal is not only to teach students how to design but to help them cultivate an enduring curiosity, an orientation of care, openness, and inquiry that extends beyond the classroom into the wider world.
Research and Teaching Interest
Multispecies Design and Ecological Perspectives
Interspecies empathy and world-sharing, movement-based and embodied design methods, co-creation with non-human systems, urban wildlife coexistence, multispecies urbanism, citizen science for urban ecologies, embodied environmental sensing, public engagement and research communication.
Art, Activism, and Research-Based Practice
Art as activism, research-based art and design, speculative and critical design, environmental art and climate justice, experiential media, multimodal installations, interactive projection and performance, embodied experience and sensorium, spatial and public space design.
Urbanism, Systems Thinking, and Sustainable Design
Urban design, public space design, systems thinking in ecological design, urban planning for multispecies coexistence, data visualization, data art, participatory design, co-creation, sustainable materials, circular design, industrial design methods, material innovation, translating scientific knowledge through design, explorative design for emerging technologies.
Technology, Media, and Ethics
Ethics of emerging technologies, media and society, philosophy of AI, surveillance, gender and capitalism in digital culture, climate change communication through design and art, attention and perception in digital and physical environments.
Interaction, HCI, and Prototyping
HCI principles, interaction design, prototyping (low- to high-fidelity, physical and digital), physical computing, digital fabrication (laser cutting, 3D printing, CNC), generative design, UX/UI design, responsive web and mobile design, branding, typography, visual communication, game design, playful interaction.