Jonghak Choi is a PhD student in Design Research at the Royal College of Art, based in the RCA Robotics Laboratory. His research explores interactive, AI-mediated installations that use generative AI as a medium for critically examining its own environmental and social impacts. His practice brings together immersive media, data visualisation, spatial narratives and discursive design.
Drawing on his academic background in industrial design and professional experience as a product designer for mental health and carbon accounting platforms, his practice-based research explores the intersections of technology, design and critical inquiry.
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Biography
Jonghak Choi obtained BS (2021) and MS (2023) in Industrial Design from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), South Korea. His master’s research at the Next Interface Lab, advised by Professor Sangsu Lee, examined how user experience design can foster psychological ownership to promote responsible user behaviour, taking shared micromobility services as its case. While at KAIST he also worked as a UI/UX designer on industry–academic projects with NAVER and NH Investment & Securities, and exhibited generative image work in Generative Images – Computational Aesthetics Vol. 4.
After graduating, Jonghak worked in industry as a designer. As a UX/UI designer at Atommerce (2023–2024), he took part in designing a psychological counselling community and platform, digital therapeutics (DTx) products, and a counselling platform SDK and SaaS, and contributed to the company’s design system. He then joined Thingspire (2024–2025) as a product designer, working on product and brand design and design system development for a carbon accounting SaaS solution. This experience of carbon accounting informs his current interest in how invisible environmental costs can be made tangible and opened to public critique.
Jonghak joined the Royal College of Art in September 2026 as a PhD student in Design Research, supervised by Dr Sina Sareh and Dr Ravi K. Sikhwal. His practice-based research investigates how the real-time computational cost of generative AI can be reframed as narrative material for critiquing environmental responsibility in AI-mediated art, bringing together immersive media, data visualisation, spatial narratives and discursive design.
Alongside his doctoral research, he aims to build a body of exhibition work that uses digital media to explore the critical and social roles of technology, and to contribute to design research and practice in South Korea and internationally.
Practice
Through his practice, Jonghak seeks to explore how emerging technologies can be turned back on themselves as a means of critique. He is interested in what happens when a technology becomes both the subject and the medium of a work, and in what kinds of questions can only be raised from within it.
At present, this exploration centres on generative AI and its relationship with the environment. He hopes to examine the tensions the technology carries: between what it offers and what it consumes, and between the individual experience it creates and the collective cost it leaves behind. He aims to give these tensions a form that audiences can encounter and discuss, without claiming to resolve them.
More broadly, he wants to investigate how interactive and immersive installations can work as discursive objects, inviting people to consider their own part in the systems they use, and how design practice can help shape public conversation around new technologies.
Thesis
Choi, J. (2023). User Experience Design through Psychological Ownership to Promote Responsible User Behavior: The Case of Shared Micromobility Services. Master’s thesis, KAIST.
Exhibitions
Pictorilic in Paper (2020). Generative Images – Computational Aesthetics Vol. 4, sponsored by KAIST Graduate School of Culture Technology.
On Air Hits. KAIST Industrial Design Graduation Exhibition.
Research interests
Immersive Media, Data Visualisation, Spatial Narratives, Discursive Design.
Jonghak’s research explores how immersive and interactive media can make invisible systems tangible and open them to critique. He is interested in discursive design that uses artefacts to open public debate on the critical and social roles of technology; artistic data visualisation that turns environmental data into embodied experience; and spatial narratives that unfold through audience interaction in physical–digital space. His doctoral research focuses on the environmental cost of generative AI and the responsibility of AI-mediated art.
Current and recent projects
He is working on a practice-based doctoral project developing a voice-interactive media installation in which the real-time computational cost of generative AI, the power consumed and the carbon emitted in generating the artwork, is made visible and reframed as narrative material for critiquing environmental responsibility.