About
AI Design Engineer, Builder, AI Product Designer, UX Engineer, Design Technologist
The title keeps changing because the boundaries barely exist anymore. I work where they overlap: designing, building, and shipping in one motion.
I'm Eunsu Kim, though most people call me Sue. I'm a Senior Design Engineer at IBM Research. I turn emerging AI capabilities into products people can actually use: model playgrounds, coding agents, and risk tooling. My sweet spot is zero-to-one: finding the product inside ambiguous research, prototyping it in code, and learning fast enough to shape what ships. I'm also exploring how AI agents can become native collaborators in the design process itself.
I trained in landscape architecture at Harvard GSD. Landscapes don't hold still: you design for systems that grow, erode, and get used in ways you never planned. That taught me to understand the system first, then design the interface to it. Before IBM, I put that approach to work at MIT's Senseable City Lab and Civic Data Design Lab, building interactive tools that made complex urban data tangible.
Lately I've been taking ideas from first sketches to deployed products end to end: product thinking, interaction design, front end, back end, and launch. I can move independently when the path is unclear, but I do my best work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers, making technical tradeoffs together and carrying the design intent all the way into production.
How I work
Prototype in code
The medium is the material. A static mock can't tell you how streaming latency feels or where an agent loses the user's trust. Working software can. So I start there.
Make AI legible
Streaming states, visible sources, honest progress. People trust a model when the interface shows what it's doing, and what it doesn't know.
Ship, measure, iterate
A launched product teaches more in a week than a deck does in a quarter. I'd rather put version one in front of people and fix it than keep polishing version zero.
Beyond the screens
Off the clock I climb 🧗♀️ and play tennis 🎾, both games where you commit to a move and find out immediately whether it was the right one. The rest of my curiosity goes to cooking and travel: new recipes, new cities, new ways of doing familiar things. It keeps the ideas coming from somewhere other than a screen.
