Taekhan Yun sees humanity and imperfection as a design method
Designer Taekhan Yun focuses on how ideas form through drawing, collaboration, and making, as ways of staying with what is fragile and unresolved. His work process allows form to emerge slowly through relation rather than control. Across projects such as Chair for Kids and Birdhouse by Kids, as well as personal works like What My Father Left and We No Longer Read Each Other, this approach becomes a kind of listening practice; one that treats emotion, memory, and imperfection not as secondary material, but as the starting point for making.
In this sense, his work resonates with a quieter way of design thinking, where vulnerability is not an aesthetic layer but a method: a way of slowing down, of allowing contradiction and softness to remain present without being resolved too quickly. It is within this field that designboom spoke with the designer about his practice, his process, and the emotional terrain his projects open up.
all images courtesy of Taekhan Yun
slow design makes space for intuition and unexpected outcomes
Rather than treating design as a closed, solely personal act, Taekhan Yun’s work opens it up into something shared and evolving. Children’s drawings, in particular, are not used as references but as active languages that shape the work itself. As he explains, ‘while studying design in France, I had many experiences where collaboration between people from different backgrounds led projects to expand in unexpected and positive directions,’ a sensibility that later shaped his approach in Cambodia. ‘Rather than simply creating a final product for children, I believed it was more meaningful to approach the project in a way that allowed the children themselves to participate in the design process,’ the designer shares with designboom.
There is something important in how these gestures stay open; how the line between imagination and object is never fully fixed. Design, in his words, is not something delivered to a final point but something that expands through participation. Children’s imagination plays a central role in this shift; not as a romantic idea, but as a form of thinking that destabilizes fixed design logic: ‘children possess a free and intuitive imagination that adult designers often cannot easily conceive of.’ Through working with these ideas, he explains, he wanted ‘to show that design is not an area centered solely around professionals, but something that can grow and expand through diverse forms of participation.’
Across the chair and birdhouse projects, imperfection remains visible rather than edited out. The handmade process holds time within it. Hesitation, repetition, accident, and revision become a way of thinking through making. ‘My recent personal work in Cambodia continuously reveals traces of humanity and imperfection, because every piece is made entirely by hand. As a result, the process moves relatively slowly. However, this slowness allows forms and ideas to remain, evolve, and transform over time. Through the repeated process of making and revising, unexpected mistakes or accidental deformations often emerge. Yet these moments frequently become opportunities to discover new stories and forms. For me, this process expands my thinking in a better direction, allowing me to follow intuition and deepen the work itself,’ he notes.
Taekhan Yun explores design through collaboration with children
finding the human trace in a hyper-productive design culture
Even when working with machine precision in other contexts, Taekhan Yun stays attentive to what disappears when things become too perfect: the small irregularities that make objects feel alive. Within this balance, softness becomes less an aesthetic and more a position, a way of working against acceleration without simply refusing it, while promoting slowness, imperfection, and human emotion as alternative possibilities for design.
It draws attention to what is left out of fast cycles of production, where images and objects circulate and disappear almost immediately. As he puts it, ‘designs are shared and replicated much faster than before, within an environment where one trend is quickly replaced by another, this is an unavoidable flow,’ yet ‘I’ve always been more interested in the other side. Rather than focusing on trendy forms or styles, I think about whether design can contain relationships between people, emotions, memories, and a sense of human warmth.’ That ‘other side’ is where tenderness begins to take shape as something that runs through the entire process of making. Working with children makes this especially visible, since ‘each child expresses and understands things differently, requiring continuous adjustment and responsiveness.’
‘Children’s perspectives are often regarded as unprofessional, yet I believe they contain clues that designers tend to overlook. I believe that the ability to see the world through the eyes of another being, such as children, is an essential attitude for designers. This perspective can also be extended to non-human entities, such as animals and plants,’ Yun tells designboom. In this sense, the work gently pushes against fixed ways of seeing and making, opening space for other forms of attention and other kinds of relationships to form through design. As he concludes, ‘design in which multiple perspectives can coexist creates a healthier world,’ and he hopes for ‘more open perspectives and a more affirmative sensibility.’
children’s drawings become active tools within the design process
participation shapes the final form of each project
imagination and object-making remain closely connected
Birdhouse by Kids transforms drawings into built objects
imperfections remain visible as part of the finished work
unexpected deformations generate new forms and narratives
small irregularities are treated as signs of human presence
slowness becomes a tool for observation and reflection
multiple perspectives coexist within Taekhan Yun’s design practice
personal works explore memory, absence, and human relationships
project info:
designer: Taekhan Yun
projects featured: Chair for Kids, Birdhouse by Kids, What My Father Left, We No Longer Read Each Other
The post making room for tenderness: taekhan yun embraces slowness and imperfection in design appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
