In 2007, Bohyemian wanted to gain a deeper understanding of herself due to inexplicable dissatisfaction regarding her work and daily life. Through this process, she realized that she had written all the details of her experiences and emotional fluctuations on her private account of a Social Network Service, called Cyworld. Thus, she made a decision to collect and re-read 436 diary entries that she wrote in 2006, classifying them into twelve emotions placed along color spectrums. For example: angry, very angry, slightly angry, gloomy, wishful, and happy. Those diary entries were encoded to visual languages, and, in the end, were translated to a large-scale print product called Temperature of My Mind that illustrated her emotional trends for a year and enabled her to understand the rationale for her discomfort.

This unique design study was a leap into the world of data visualization, and she became aware of the importance of this field, envisioning a way to utilize data as a language so that she could learn about herself and convey her stories, including her previously-opaque thoughts and emotions, through visualization methodologies.

Later, her first data visualization was shown in Raw Data: Infographic Designers' Sketchbooks by Steven Heller , Information Aesthetics / Visualising Data by Andy Kirk, De Young Museum, Guangzhou’s Design Korea Exhibition, and Adobe Design Achievement Awards (as one of the first Korean winners in the ADAA’s history)

After this work, she has been creating and exploring diverse forms of data-driven projects, beyond data visualization.

Bohyemian continued this first inspiring data visualization design experience by conducting further investigations through a variety of UX/UI and data-driven projects that integrated digital and physical information in diverse fields, including interactive data visualizations, a social network service, a search engine, mobile/web services, and interactive installations for digital advertising and media art. During this period, her data and UX/UI design practices were dedicated to the improvement of people's daily experiences — both personal and communal.

While working on a project – which later won the IF design award--called KT Olleh Square for Korea Telecom (a leading Korean telecommunications organization) as a lead UX designer at Vinyl Interactive in Korea, Bohyemian became aware of different information consumption patterns and interaction behaviors among users in the spatial environment that we do not see in screen-based media.

At Naver Corporation, South Korea’s premier Internet company and top search engine, she was on a team for the Naver portal service and harnessed big data from the company's data center to make various decisions about human-centered designs using data analytics and statistics. In addition, working for a Social Network Service, called me2day was a fascinating opportunity not only to discover the social and cultural impact of user-generated data and content in a social network ecosystem, but also to examine novel ideas regarding potential data utilization in the next generation of social networks.

In the meantime, working on personal research, she constantly challenged herself with new forms of data visualization by applying more sophisticated engineering skills. Visualizing Works is a 3D interactive data visualization (web application) that illustrates her 63 projects from 2002 to 2010. In this project, she explored a panoply of methods to design and develop an interactive data visualization in the 3D environment for web, considering the effectivity, memorability, and accessibility based on color theories. This project was published in the book, “Raw Data: Infographic Designers' Sketchbooks” together with “Temperature of My Mind.”

Bohyemian's other notable project is a web application called DataLovers that visualizes 100 recent tweets and 100 useful websites for early learners who want to initially explore the field of data visualization. From this project, she realized the great value of creating a data visualization application for education, which inspired her to foresee the importance of people’s data literacy in the future.

From 2008 to 2014 in Korea, Bohyemian was fortunate to have incomparable professional opportunities to build foundations for two specialties: Data Visualization and UX/UI design.

Nonetheless, as delved deeper into data visualization and design, more and more questions arose surrounding diverse topics such as data & human communication, and data-driven self-expression. In addition, Bohyemian wanted to carve out her own definition of data through conducting more research projects.

These big questions and passion for data fueled her desire to leave Korea and start a long journey in the US. The first adventure began at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the autumn of 2014.

At RISD, Bohyemian studied various forms of data-driven projects that include web-based data visualization, sculptural data visualization, data sonification, and data-driven system/self-expression, pondering several questions about the novel representation and utilization of data.

Bohyemian's data practice, Solar System (it was granted the Iron A’ Design Award) widened her horizons about data-driven works because it led to her excursion into data sonification/data-driven self-expression, and data experience in the spatial environment. The insights gleaned from this work motivated her MFA thesis research book, named "Walking in a Place, Walkestra", which included the discussion of designing and developing a methodology to generate a ‘decodable personalized soundtrack’ using an individual’s ‘walking data’ collected in a place. Using cartographic and human movement data for data-driven creativity was challenging and ultimately led to the creation of a novel type of data-driven content.

Her data visualization studies continued at a city scale when she became a recipient of a fellowship and worked at MIT Senseable City Lab. This opportunity paved the way to view her research at RISD and data visualizations derived from urban data from various angles. In particular, she saw how design and technology impact urban imagination and social innovation, through creating data-driven web-applications, such as PisaPOOL, Urban Exposures, Driving DNA, and an award-winning data visualization project, CityWays. CityWays was granted the Golden prize in 2018 A’ Design Award and Competition, a prize in 2018 World Changing Ideas Awards, 2018 Information Is Beautiful Award (long list), and featured in Episode 13 of the Data Vis Today Podcast, internationally well-known design magazines, IdN in HK and Monthly Design in KR.

Various lessons taken from research at two institutes enabled her to have a deeper knowledge of data-driven creations not to mention the data itself. These projects leveraged the high level of motivation and themes she is hoping to develop in the coming years. She was naturally able to begin the next journey with data, design, and more advanced questions.

Bohyemian's next journey began at Datadog (a world leading IT monitoring service) by inventing a new menu, called the Service Map. This menu is an interactive network graph that visualizes complex communications amongst cloud services and their health levels. While working on the Service Map, and the improvements for the Host Map / the Container Map (other maps on the datadog web app), she was able to create a more easily interpretable display, reducing users’ information processing time and short-term memory usage. The Service Map, especially, required multiple design solutions because of complex user flows and the topological structure of the network map. In addition, The lack of knowledge relating to data makes understanding graphs and interpreting dynamic changes in data quantity difficult. For this reason, she wrangled and visualized multiple sample datasets to identify gaps between expected visualizations and actual data representations. Consequently, she developed functioning solutions to increase the graphs’ interpretability by reducing their density. The solutions included a clustering and layout principle that used a community detection algorithm, and design elements.

After the launch of the service map, it has been acclaimed by many people in the industry and displayed at a conference as well as on various media platforms. She partially explained these discoveries in her feature interview with the Monthly Design.

At Microsoft, she continued to explore the impact of data visualization and design for complex systems, through her work surrounding Machine Learning & AI products. An open-source project, called the Error Analysis Toolkit enabled her to better understand how graphs work in machine learning model development processes for data scientists. In general, traditional model performance metrics are insufficient in evaluating models due to the performance incomparability across different data groups. To solve this problem, this toolkit was developed to investigate root causes of errors via multiple solutions, composed of various graphs with clustering and filtering interfaces. Another AI/ML product, the Azure Machine Learning Studio supports the whole machine learning life cycle requiring pre-precessing data, choosing an ML model, applying the ML model to ML/AI products and more stages for diverse groups of users. To facilitate all tasks through the minimization of codes for everyone, the Azure Machine Learning Studio, which is the UI-based workbench, is essential in the development of AI/ML products.

While developing and designing graphs and generic interaction/user interface for the the AML studio, and the Error Analysis Toolkit, she was able to investigate the critical roles of graphs in making data more comprehensive for human communication across the whole ML life cycle.

I (Bohyemian) have spent the greater part of my life delving into design, art, and technology as a professional and student in the UK, Korea, and the USA. Looking back at my trajectory, the chances to pursue answers to the inquiries which naturally arose through my work were gifts and chasing them made me more creative and energetic. Those opportunities also allowed me to be confident and independent-minded, to push to find value where sometimes others hadn’t yet explored. As Bohyemian at Bohyemian Lab, I pursue design research focusing on data-driven self expression through walking, reading, and more. I believe that my works, Bohyemian Labsodies, will take me to new adventures, through which I can explore into even more intriguing questions.