On 3 December 2024, South Korea lived through a surreal day: martial law declared, then overturned within hours.
Fear and old memories of violence surfaced – but what appeared in the streets was different:
- K-pop lightsticks instead of weapons
- Hand-drawn meme flags (“I want to go home”, “National Lying Down Association”)
- Prepaid cups of warm coffee waiting for strangers
In this session, Jooseok Oh (Founder, CEO BARAM Experience Co., Ltd) shares these fragile, powerful “human technologies” and explores what they teach us about designing experiences, democracy, and sustainable coexistence – not as the organiser, but as a Korean experience researcher and storyteller.
Key takeaways:
This session gives you a set of lenses and prompts to design with the human technologies your audiences invent for themselves – not just with the tools you buy or build.
- A backstage context-mapping method for any audience
A reusable way to map the “hidden layers” behind behaviour – from 1980–90s democracy movements to 2002 World Cup streets, 2016 candlelight protests and the 2024–25 “revolution of light”. You’ll leave with questions you can use to surface your own city’s historical layers before you design. - A lens for reading symbols as human tech, not props
How to treat K-pop lightsticks, meme flags and prepaid cups of warm coffee as serious interfaces for emotion, identity and care – and how to run the same analysis on the objects, memes and habits your audiences already bring from home. - Design prompts for when people refuse to follow the script
Concrete prompts to redesign one current project so it anticipates where people will really move: from staying home to coming out, from standing still to studying under streetlights, from consuming to organising heated buses and late-night snacks for strangers. - A pattern library for bottom-up solidarity hacks
Transferable patterns from Korea’s winter nights – from foil-blanket “Kisses” cheering squads to anonymous donors sending heated buses – that you can adapt to festivals, museums, cities and brands without copying the politics. - A sharper definition of “human tech” for experience makers
A way to distinguish between digital tools and the human technologies of time, risk and shared belief – plus a closing question set you can use with your team: “Where will we let people become the protagonists here?”