A New Perspective of Cultural DNA

Ji-Hyun Lee is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Culture Technology (GSCT) in Korea Advanced Institute of Science Technology (KAIST). She received her Ph.D. in School of Architecture (Computational Design) at Carnegie Mellon University writing a thesis about integrating housing design and case-based reasoning. Since joining the GSCT at KAIST, her research focus narrowed down to three interdisciplinary areas that are not mutually exclusive: (1) calculation for UX + service design, (2) cultural DNA with morphological analysis, and (3) computational creativity. These explorations result in computer-based frameworks or systems contributing to the enhancement of the calculability using algorithmic and/or heuristic computational methods. In other words, her research focus is on ‘computational culture’ as an extension of computational design.

She served for the Secretary of Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) from 2008 to 2010. Currently, she is the Director of the Information-Based Design (IBD) Research Group, Descartes Lab in KAIST and also serving as the Editorial Board Member for Architecture Research and International Journal of Innovations in Information Technology. She also serves as a Director of Korean Society of Service Design and Innovation (KSSDI), Korean Society of Design Science (KSDS) and HCI Korea. She is a member of Architectural Institute of Korea (AIK), Korea Intelligent Information System Society (KIISS), Society of CAD/ CAM Engineers and SIG-Design Creativity of the Design Society.