For the past twelve years, I have been writing letters. Not research papers, not design documentation — letters. Personal, handwritten letters addressed to God, written across years of professional work, personal loss, and the quiet in-between. By now, there are more than four thousand of them. When I began writing them, I did not know they would become the most important research material of my career. I know that now.
Those letters taught me something that twenty-two years of enterprise UX design practice had not fully surfaced: that the deepest human needs — healing, dignity, meaning, belonging — are precisely the dimensions that AI-driven systems most consistently fail to address. This gap is not a technical problem. It is a design problem. And it is the problem I want to spend the next chapter of my work researching.
I have spent the majority of my career designing at scale. As a Principal UX Designer at AT&T, I led enterprise UX modernization efforts — building design systems, AI interface frameworks, and end-to-end experience architectures used by thousands of internal and external users. At DirecTV, I shaped the user experience of large-scale digital platforms under organizational transformation. At Northrop Grumman and SADA, I worked in the high-stakes intersection of defense systems, cloud infrastructure, and human factors — where a poorly designed interface is not merely an inconvenience but a risk to safety and trust.
What I observed across all of these environments is this: when AI enters an organization, it rarely fails because of technology. It fails because of design culture. Organizations introduce AI tools into systems that were never designed to accommodate them — where the assumptions, governance models, and human-centered values needed for ethical AI integration simply do not exist.
"My practice has been my research. I just did not yet have the academic framework to name it as such."
The question I bring to doctoral study is this: How does design — practiced with depth, ethics, and conscious attention to human dignity — transform organizations, individuals, and society in the age of AI?
I call this Deep Design: the idea that design is not merely a professional service or aesthetic discipline, but a force capable of forming culture, building trust, and — when practiced with intention — restoring what technology risks eroding.
How AI transforms organizational design culture — AT&T · DirecTV · enterprise AI UX · design systems at scale.
Cognitive load, trust asymmetry, and AI legibility — Northrop Grumman · SADA · MS thesis.
How design culture is formed and transmitted through mentorship — Future Designer Portfolio Lab.
The thread that connects this research — and that I did not fully see until recently — is the same thread running through four thousand letters. Each letter was an act of design: a deliberate, attentive shaping of thought and feeling into language, directed toward something larger than myself. Each one asked, in its own way: What does it mean to reach a human being?
That is the question my AI Reach LAB is built around. "Reach" is intentional: AI reaching toward healing, dignity, children, and organizational culture — not as a metaphor, but as a research methodology.
I come to doctoral study not as a student beginning a career, but as a practitioner who has arrived at the edge of what practice alone can answer. Twenty-two years of enterprise design have given me evidence, methodology, and frameworks. What I need now is the academic rigor, the research community, and the institutional context to develop them into knowledge that can be shared, tested, and built upon.
"Design, practiced at its deepest — with attention to human dignity, ethical responsibility, and genuine care for the people it serves — does not merely solve problems. It forms culture. It shapes who we become. In the age of AI, that capacity has never mattered more, and never been more at risk."
Korina (Yoo-Kyung) Han · 한유경 · yookyunglim@hansgraphicarts229.onmicrosoft.com · linkedin.com/in/agnashan · ~900 words