About Us
JEDI Lab is an interdisciplinary research group led by Dr. Janghee Cho at the Department of Design, National University of Singapore. We approach design not only as a process and a discipline but as a means of shaping our art of living. We use design as a form of inquiry into how technologies mediate everyday life and how they might support more joyful, relational, and reflective experiences. Our current research centers on reflection and care in an increasingly AI-mediated everyday life, working with youth, families, and care workers in Singapore and broader Asian contexts through participatory and research-through-design approaches.
At the JEDI Lab, we are committed to a set of core principles that guide our research and design practices:
We Design for Joyful Experience
We create technologies that enrich everyday life. For us, joy is not a metric to optimize, nor an escape from difficulty. It is a way of navigating uncertainty with everyday creativity and connection: something that emerges from relations that sustain us. Designing for joy means designing the conditions in which it can arise.
We Embrace Reflective Practices We believe in the power of reflection as a meaning-making process. Our work fosters conversations between people and their experiences, objects, and situations. Rather than treating reflection as a deliberate, individual exercise, we understand it as relational, embodied, and emergent in everyday life. Drawing on Daoist philosophy, we pluralize what reflection can mean in design.
We Practice Care-full and Critical Design
Care sits at the center of our design philosophy, guiding both what we study and how we work. Rooted in critical technical practice, we question whose needs technologies serve. This is why we strive to understand people's lived experiences in depth, and why we work with, rather than on, the communities we study. Through this practice, we design technologies that challenge conventional norms and honor what matters in people's everyday lives.
We Focus on Sociotechnical Systems We understand that technology does not exist in isolation but is deeply interconnected with society and culture. By exploring the dynamic interplay between technology, social systems, and human values, we design for the everyday lives of diverse communities.