OVERVIEW
Bridging a Depopulating Local Community and Visitors Through AR
ROLE
Product Design Lead
TEAM
Product Design Lead(Me!) Local cooperative (Cheong pung) 3 Product Managers 2 Product Designers 4 Front-end Engineers 4 Back-end Engineers
DURATION
Jun 2025 - Present
SKILLS
User Research
UIUX Design
Character Design
Prototyping
IMPACT
DESIGN PROCESS
Discover
Understanding the problem through research and firsthand experience.
Field research
Interview
Empathise
Define
Synthesizing insights to frame the problem statement.
Participatory Design
How might we?
Persona
Affinity Diagram
Develop
Developing a solution with locals and visitors.
Ideation
Prototype
Deliever
Delivering a solution and iterating design process with team.
Test & Iteration
Takeaways
PROBLEM
Young People Leaving, New Connections Needed
Ganghwa Island, where 40% of residents are elderly, faces South Korea's rural depopulation crisis. Standardized government infrastructure initiatives brought one-time visitors without listening to locals or creating lasting connections, leaving community voices excluded from their own tourism narrative.
A quiet but charming local place, Ganghwa Island. [Source]
Only human connection creates the repeat engagement that sustains rural economies.
The local cooperative, 'Cheong pung' has found success through cultural programs, but these efforts lack scalability and the ability to demonstrate measurable impact without technology.
Intimate local programs increased revisit rates, but lacked scalability and measurable impact
DEFINE
Key insight: Three-way disconnect
Visitors still felt superficial:
"The current program website has limited capacity, and I don't know where to go or how to start conversations with locals outside of the programs."
Locals felt underutilized:
"Tourists photograph our shops but rarely engage with us. The programs work well, but we need more opportunities to share our stories."
The cooperative felt limited:
"Due to limited technology and staff, we can only run a few local programs and could not measure their impact."
Persona
I analyzed the cooperative's program data, visitor reviews, and card transaction demographics to create a visitor persona: experience-driven explorers with high digital literacy.
SOLUTION
Help tourists genuinely connect with locals through missions that build emotional ties to the region.
Visitors can see mission locations on the map, but to complete them, they must engage with locals directly, ensuring community voices remain central to the visitor experience rather than being bypassed by digital content.
Visibility & Scalability: Discover local stories on the map
Visitors discover local missions on the map, connecting them with locals at specific locations. These missions are designed by local cooperatives through participatory workshops.
Depth: AR as a conversation Starter
Two AR mission types integrate locals as active participants, triggering interactions between locals and visitors.
Mission 1. Find a Local Character: Connect to Locals Directly
Visitors activate their AR camera to search for a local character, "Sunmu." They must complete missions involving local interactions, before the character appears and scan the hidden sticker to unlock AR content, rewards, and local stories.Mission 2. AR sticky note: Creating Shared Memory Across Time
Visitors leave virtual messages at heritage sites for future tourists to discover, building emotional continuity and transforming individual visits into collective memory.
* I designed the character in 2D and adapted it into a 3D-rendered image using Nano Banana.
Scalability: AI Chatbot as "Curiosity Instigator"
The chatbot enables remote exploration of Ganghwa's stories for trip planning. On the island, it provides way finding help but intentionally offers minimal story details, encouraging visitors to learn from locals directly rather than through the app.
USER TESTING
Sustaining Engagement Through Local Interaction
During the several field trips, we conducted user testing with locals and visitors.
By interviewing them, we confirmed that the system effectively work and observed spontaneous, meaningful interactions between visitors and locals, resulting in an average conversation duration of 7 minutes per interaction.
