Research Portfolio · 2026
Beyond
access.
Toward dignity.
My research begins from a simple problem: formal access does not always preserve dignity. A space can be technically usable and still make someone feel slower, less capable, more dependent, or less like themselves.
HCI · Urban Space · Inclusive Design
IUMB Framework
Central Research Question
How do formal and informal urban mobility barriers shape dignity, selfhood, and participation for people whose bodies, languages, or cognitive conditions are not anticipated by the built environment, and how can interactive technologies support not only access but the preservation of identity in movement?
Methods
Sustained presence before explanation.
My approach combines ethnographic accompaniment, participatory design, video documentation, qualitative observation, and low-fidelity / interactive prototyping. I work from sustained presence rather than one-time interviews, using observation, co-reflection, and situated prototypes to understand how people navigate spaces that formally allow access but still reduce dignity, confidence, or selfhood.
Ethnographic accompaniment
Moving with people through ordinary routes, not only asking them to describe those routes later.
Participatory design
Testing assumptions with people whose realities are often treated as edge cases.
Video documentation
Using route records and situated images to notice hesitation, waiting, workaround, and repair.
Interactive prototyping
Building low-threshold tools that make pressure, memory, language, and attention visible.
Research Contribution
I aim to contribute a dignity-oriented perspective to accessibility and urban mobility research: one that asks not only whether a person can reach a destination, but what the journey costs them socially, emotionally, and bodily. This work connects HCI, spatial research, and inclusive design by treating the built environment as an interactive system that communicates assumptions about who belongs, what support is available, and what kinds of bodies are considered normal.
Research Scope
People
MCI (mild cognitive impairment) · professional caregivers · temporary disability · low-vision / amblyopia
Geography
Taiwan as initial fieldwork site · transferable to mid-to-high income cities (Netherlands, Japan, Singapore)
Boundary
Not infrastructure absence — the assumption is that standards are nominally met, yet people remain excluded
IUMBs describe
What obstructs movement
Dignity Barriers describe
What movement costs,
even when the path is technically open
A dignity barrier is a condition under which a designed space — without blocking physical passage — makes a person feel they were not expected, do not belong, or must become less than themselves to move through it.
Research Lenses
Reading buildings as interfaces
A clinic, station, counter, corridor, or elevator is not only a physical setting. It gives instructions, withholds support, and quietly decides who can move with confidence.
Noticing workarounds
When people wait in the wrong place, ask a stranger, avoid a route, carry extra notes, or depend on someone else, those actions reveal what the designed system failed to make legible.
Designing from lived exceptions
The problem is not that some people are difficult to design for. The problem is that many systems are built around an imagined average user, then treat ordinary human variation as an exception.
Case Study Contexts
Mobility Hubs
Movement includes waiting. For older adults, people with reduced stamina, or those in areas where buses run infrequently, waiting is not an exception to the journey. Research in Rotterdam found that immigrant and low-income users value social and service functions of mobility hubs as much as transport function.
Residential Areas
The relevant barriers are often the ones closest to home. Research in Amsterdam found that older residents of Moroccan and Turkish backgrounds are disproportionately housed in mid-rise buildings reachable only by stairs — a direct legacy of earlier labor migration patterns.
Green & Leisure Spaces
Access is inseparable from presence. A space can be technically accessible while making a person feel they were not meant to be there. Ray Oldenburg's concept of the third place: a space where different people can be present together without any of them feeling like a special case.
Medical Consultation
The consultation room is among the most asymmetric spaces in urban life. Ten minutes, a body under stress, a language that may not be your own, and the assumption that the person across the desk shares enough of your reality to understand what you are trying to say. This case produced the first tool in the series.
Before Five Minutes ↗