Dr. Kang’s Story

Dr. Kang (she/her) was born in Detroit, MI (b. 1986) to parents who immigrated to the US in the mid-1980s when South Korea was under authoritarian rule. Her parents survived postwar Korea, and are children of survivors of forced displacement, spurred by the Korean War and a 35-year occupation of the peninsula. Like many first gen kids (i.e., first in their families to grow up in the US), Dr. Kang quickly developed entrepreneurial skills throughout her formative years by working in the legendary swap meets in downtown Los Angeles with her mother, translating government documents/services from English to Korean for her parents, and taking care of her younger siblings on her days off to support family endeavors.

Despite a humble & not-so-unique upbringing, Dr. Kang was fortunate to have parents who encouraged her to dream big and (emotionally) supported her interests in poetry, creative writing, and film photography. While she was a part-time student at Pasadena City College and night student at Art Center College of Design, she was fortunate to meet creative, sharp, and kind educators who fully supported her vision and work. Through their network, she became an active member of a (b&w film photo) darkroom co-op located in Hollywood, CA, where her community of LA-based artists, designers, writers, and curators blossomed.

Dr. Kang transferred from PCC and ACCD to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with two merit-based financial awards, where she explored her artistic practice through SAIC’s no-majors, no-grades, concept-over-technique pedagogical model. As a student, she was introduced to socially-engaged art, relational aesthetics, and place-based artistic critique. She also embarked on her first position in advocacy and local government as an intern and, later, project manager of a one-year initiative at the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Dr. Kang’s senior thesis focused on the politics and affective quality of language in everyday contexts, referring to her experiences growing up in Dallas, TX and Los Angeles, CA.

Like many millennials, Dr. Kang juggled multiple part-time jobs during the Great Recession, which she wrote about here. Determined to transition from the arts to nonprofit management, Dr. Kang moved back to Los Angeles, CA after nine months in San Fransisco. After approximately 50 informational interviews, she applied to two additional openings that she found on Craigslist, and, luckily, received two offers upon a year on the job market. In the summer of 2011, she became a Fellow at the Taproot Foundation and, initially, an Executive Assistant at the Durfee Foundation. She delved into the grantmaking world, regionally and nationally, and expanded her role at the foundation to oversee investments in STE(A)M education. Dr. Kang joined several governing and advisory boards of nonprofit organizations, and founded and launched the region’s first mentorship program for emerging practitioners in the field with seed funding that spanned two fiscal years.

With a desire to marry her creative background with her interests in urbanism, social justice, and systems-level change, Dr. Kang received mentorship from Jenny Liang of the design consulting firm, Continuum, for roughly one year. Dr. Kang intentionally sought Liang’s community-based approach to design and philosophies that deviated away from the canon of design practice (i.e., IDEO). She developed a portfolio that catapulted her graduate school career at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she also received a merit-based financial award to attend. Dr. Kang pursued a Master’s in social design, an emerging subfield in design, at the time, that integrated social justice principles and social work practices into socially engaged, local design projects. Her thesis focused on the role of human centered design (practice) and social design (principles) in community development work with a focus on food deserts—their social relations and histories—in West Baltimore. This work laid the groundwork for developing a community liaison position housed in the City’s public health department. Through her graduate studies, Dr. Kang was introduced to movements that deeply questioned the dominant underpinnings of design industry, practice and philosophy, as they were framed in Danah Abdulla’s early work (alumnae of the same program).

During this time, Dr. Kang was awarded an opportunity at the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI) under the Obama Administration to focus on transition planning during the final year of his second term. WHIAAPI was initially developed under the Clinton administration upon finding that this community had the lowest engagement with existing federal services despite their growing rate of poverty and under-representation in legislation. Through an Executive Order (EO), WHIAAPI functioned as an advocacy arm for the AAPI (now AANHPI or APA) community. As the inaugural Designer-in-Residence with a one-year term, Dr. Kang employed design methods to strategic planning meetings, developed a framework for a national network of career federal staff, and supported efforts for transition planning (of leadership).

Disregarding initial plans to plant roots in the Baltimore/DC area after her one-year term at WHIAAPI, Dr. Kang relocated to Brooklyn, NY where she further developed an independent practice with the intention of gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between community-based design, justice-oriented design, and (sparking) structural change. With this political orientation, Dr. Kang was sought out and recruited to join, advise, or lead teams for the following projects: (01) Joined a female-led and only team of Design Researchers conducting work on the constituent correspondence process at the Congressional level, considering DC-based and district offices across the country. [This was with the OpenGov Foundation based in DC] (02) Led and coached Mayoral teams on the integration of human centered design methods to city budgeting practices and cross-disciplinary projects at the municipal level. [This was with Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities.] (03) Led research and process development for a state-level project that worked with ten cities, outside of NYC, across the state of New York on integrating equitable community engagement strategies to address a range of housing issues. [This was done in collaboration with Harvard Ash Center, Tolemi, and the NY State Attorney General’s Office, and it received a Route Fifty Navigator Award.] (04) Led research and product development efforts for a digital service delivery project, part of crisis response management, for the state of New Jersey at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. [This was with the NJ Office of Innovation under Governor Phil Murphy.] (05) Advised an Innovation Team expand their internal services and programming to support staff focused on strategizing ways to address urban renewal projects sparked by the closure of federal prisons in small, postindustrial towns in the northeastern region of the US. [This was with the Vera Institute of Justice.] In addition to this portfolio of work that focused on co-design, participatory design, and community engagement in policy and planning practices, Dr. Kang was a part of small scale projects that focused on education policy, coaching government staff, grassroots organizing, and periodically taught a grad-level seminar at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Dr. Kang received several accolades, press, and public speaking requests for her work as a design researcher, trailblazer, leader, and educator, including named in a NextGen10 and 40-under-40 list in 2018. To read more, you can view her CV.

Through this work, Dr. Kang’s research questions began to focus on the politics, ethics, and praxis of participation in planning and policy processes for immigrant, migrant and/or low-income communities active in “informal economies.” In order to develop a firm theoretical foundation for her work, Dr. Kang pursued a Ph.D. in Design at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was also a Teaching Fellow and fully funded doctoral student. She pursued CMU, because of its strength in design philosophy and theory with non-US-based genealogies. Dr. Kang initial shift in her thinking and work began with Dra. Silvia Mata-Marín’s work on migrant youth in the US and, later, migrant women’s everyday lives in Costa Rica. Dr. Kang’s dissertation reconceptualized two ideas from a postcolonial studies and feminist science and technology studies perspective: 1) political position of designers working in technology mediated spaces in government and nonprofit development, and 2) concept of place-based design/local design from a working class, diasporic perspective. The objective of this work was to inform the subfields of civic design, social design, and participatory design. In order to continue addressing these questions in the era of big tech and AI, Dr. Kang decided to pursue a career in research and mentoring at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology, where she is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor with a supported research agenda.