People have their own ideas and perspectives, and each have their own inspirations and roots from the past. Although those episodes may appear to be random at glance, dots connect to lines and somehow link to what they do now. Different people have different roots, and do different designs, and we are here to realize that in “Diggin’ Roots”.

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Here we look into the roots of Chee Eun Ahn, a UX researcher active in Korea but has lots of roots in Japanese culture. Despite being a researcher, her design interests go far beyond her job title.

Chee Eun Ahn
User Researcher at Bucketplace LinkedIn / Twitter

Chee Eun is a User Researcher at Bucketplace, a company that runs an interior design content platform in Korea. She studied industrial design during her undergraduate, and human-computer interaction (HCI) at her master’s degree. Her thesis project was on human-animal interaction, where she prepared a live stream system where humans can interact with a cat.

1. What is your philosophy behind design?

It is often said that design is problem solving, and you try to find the best solution to approach the problem. This, I agree in some sense, but I also think that design is something that comes from inside of you; It’s about providing a new kind of experience that has never existed. I believe that other than the problem solving part, there’s also a creative part to design.

I like to make my design playful and interactive. For example, for my master’s thesis project, I tried to look for a research topic that was kind of creative and something that wasn’t out in the world yet. And that was animal computer interaction.

I love animals, especially cats, and as I was watching the cat on live stream, I thought it would be more fun if I could actually talk or interact with them in some way through technology. So I actually made a prototype of a live streaming system for cats.  Creating a system for cats was a challenge, but the whole iteration of doing research and designing was super fun.

The motivation that led me to choose this research topic was just creating a fun, playful and memorable experience, and I think that is at the core of my design activities. 

2. What are your ways of boosting productivity?

I like going to cafes, enjoy some good coffee while I work. I can concentrate better there.

There’s a cafe called Dotori (https://www.instagram.com/dotori_yongsan/) in Yongsan, Seoul. It’s not actually a work friendly environment, but the cafe is very cozy and has lots of cute animal stuffings and aesthetics.

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This place reminds me of Ghibli Animations from Japan, the cafe mascot character looks much like Totoro, and the soundtracks they play are mostly from Ghibli as well.“Dotori” actually means acorns in Korean.

Other than that, I like to engage myself in creative activities like doodling, learning instruments, just for fun.

3. Who has been your greatest influence?

I think that will be my professor in undergrad, he was the most influential person in terms of my design.

The school that I went to was an engineering school, and at first I was majoring in material science. But after a while, I figured out that it wasn’t the best fit for me. Since I liked to create things I started looking into industrial design and I changed my major.

I met my professor at my first industrial design course that I ever took, and also he was the one who inspired me to get into playful design and interaction in the first place. One of his major works from his research team is called “TransWall”, and it is a transparent, projection-based interactive wall.

His projects and other examples he showed me were very exciting and sort of gave me the spark, and it was surely a big moment for me.

A lot of these examples came from Japan because he used to study there. Some examples would be installations from teamLab, robot projects like “Keepon”, or “Otamatone” a digital instrument from Meiwa-Denki. They were so inspirational to me.

Keepon is a robot by Hideki Kojima, and it was developed in 2003 to help children with disorders communicate and also learn how children develop their communication skills. It is very cute and playful, and I think that this aspect also creates a whole new meaning to the product. It’s very simple, but has a lot of impact.

4. Is there anything particular that might be the roots of your designs and ways of thinking?

I think there are two things that might be the roots of what I am now.

One is IKEA, which I used to go to a lot when I lived in Germany in my elementary school years. I remember going to the store and getting desks and cute toys and so on, and everytime we came back from the store we would have to build it ourselves. I would help my parents put together the furniture, which surely got me interested in making things. Also the aesthetics of IKEA design has always been the foundation of my taste in design.

I really came to like the simple and light colors in a minimalistic style. The less vibrant, less energetic, calm and gentle taste resonated with me, and has become my taste.

The second roots would be Disney Pixar animation movies, which I still enjoy watching a lot. Movies like Toy Story and Monsters Inc.. The most attractive part of these movies is the ideas in the very little details, like all the details that they put into Toy Story.

I also like the fact they turn scary stories or cults that children fear into amusing stories. Like for Monsters Inc. they have to scare children to get energy, and it’s a totally new perspective from a children’s point of view; The idea was mind blowing and interesting as a child back then. I think this really got me to think about crazy ideas and being creative.

5. What were you into as a teenager?

During my teenage years, someone introduced me to Naruto, and I started watching a lot of Japanese animations ever since.

One anime that I was especially into was Suzumiya Haruhi Series. It’s a famous Japanese anime series in a Japanese high school setting, where the main character, Haruhi Suzumiya starts off by introducing herself “I’m not interested in ordinary people. If anyone here is an alien, a time traveler, slider, or an esper, then come find me”.

She is a girl that is always seeking for thrills and adventures, and that resonated with me a lot, I always kind of felt the same way. I liked the other characters as well, and I bought all of the novels that were translated into Korean.

I even tried to memorize all the lines in Endless Eight, which is an infamous episode in the anime series where they repeated 8 episodes that looked perfectly the same, but only had minor changes.

6. Are there any services that inspired you in terms of design?

There is a Korean food delivery app called Baemin, and the reason I choose this app is because of its good service design. They found one simple problem that no one really noticed and solved it.

In Korea, food delivery is very common even from before Covid. Even though there are many competitors in the market now, Baemin was one of the earlier ones. When I was little, I used to be very afraid of calling the pizza delivery because I had to talk to a stranger. Also in Korea it would be very common to store paper pamphlets of all the nearby restaurants that do delivery, and we used to collect them and stack them. Especially when you’ve just moved in, you would literally have no information about it.

But it was so habitual that no one really thought about solving it, it was a kind of inconvenience everyone was going through, and I liked the idea that they came up with a simple solution that changed the way people live.