StoryBirdy:
Bridging the Silent Debt
An AI-powered storytelling companion fostering cultural belonging | Apr 2025 – Aug 2025
What
HRI Ecosystem
Fusing voice synthesis with physical empathy to create safe, screen-free spaces for heritage speech.
Why
Compliance vs. Identity
Research revealed that children view heritage tongues as a "compliance chore," leading to generational friction.
How
Correction to Connection
Shifting the paradigm from cognitive drills to spontaneous, empathy-led dialogue rooted in EQ.
My Role & Impact
Lead UX Researcher & Product Strategist
Spearheaded end-to-end HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) design, from ethnographic field research to high-fidelity experience prototyping.
01. CONTEXT
The Silent Debt
Where Language Clashes with Connection
It is dinner time in Queens. Four-year-old Luna speaks fluently in English, but when Grandma answers in Korean, the table grows quiet. Her mother, Jessica, smiles awkwardly. This specific silence—the friction between love and language—is where StoryBirdy was conceived.
Intergenerational Friction
Communication gaps with grandparents lead to a quiet erosion of family bonds.
The Identity Crisis
Children perceive their heritage tongue as a "foreign" task rather than a living part of their identity.
Systemic Anxiety
Parents carry "Jessica's Guilt," fearing they are failing to pass on their cultural roots.
02. DISCOVERY
Ethnographic insights into behavioral patterns
Decoding the Refusal
To understand why traditional language apps fail, I conducted Social Listening (analyzing Reddit threads) and Digital Shadowing (YouTube vlogs) to capture unfiltered emotional struggles.
03. DIAGNOSIS
Why Current Solutions Fail Multilingual Children
Multicultural families share a quiet, systemic anxiety: “I want my child to know where they come from, but I don't know where to start, and I fear the attempt will just feel like homework.”
Current solutions fail not because their curriculum is poor, but because they ignore the systemic friction in a child’s environment:
The Four Systemic Failures
01. Identity Crisis : The Child’s Lens
Heritage language without immediate social utility feels like a "Compliance-based chore" rather than a vessel for belonging.
03. Passive Learning : The Interactional Lens
Most tools focus on screen consumption, which displaces face-to-face interaction and active speech.
02. Strategy Gap : The Parent’s Lens
Parents lack a cohesive roadmap (like OPOL or ML@H) and often default to English when exhausted, leading to inconsistent routines.
04. Resource Scarcity : The Systemic Lens
Contemporary cultural folktales that resonate with modern kids are hard to find in immigrant communities.
04. ARTIFACTS
Mapping product architecture
via Systems Thinking
I developed a Systems Mapping framework to bridge the gap between qualitative data and product requirements. By mapping the causal relationships between Contextual Frictions, Strategic Objectives, and Product Behaviors, I ensured that every feature in the StoryBirdy ecosystem is a direct, traceable response to a verified human need.
In service refinement, this diagram acts as a Decision-Making Engine rooted in three professional pillars:
Traceability: Prevents feature creep by anchoring every "Behavior" in a verified human need.
Alignment: Identifies the "sweet spot" where educational goals intersect with emotional safety.
Precision: Utilizes "high-leverage" design (e.g., Emotion Orbs) to solve multiple systemic failures simultaneously.
Friction to Function
Executive Insight: From Compliance to Agency
The mapping revealed a critical systemic disconnect: heritage language loss is not a cognitive failure of learning, but a social failure of agency. By identifying that "Interactivity must replace Operation," I shifted the service logic from a task-based instruction model to a Care-Led Interaction Ritual. This transformation ensures that the language is no longer a "Compliance-based Chore" but a natural vehicle for Cultural Belonging.
05. PERSPECTIVES
User Synthesis to verify Strategic Motivation Analysis
Defining the Demand
: The Need for a New Cultural Narrative
06. CONCEPT
Bedtime stories as a core for emotional connection
We identified a global cultural core that bridges emotional, interactive, and linguistic engagement: Bedtime Stories. StoryBirdy is proposed as an Attachment Friend—an AI robotic companion that interacts through a family's heritage tongue to transform language exposure into a meaningful daily ritual.
The Universal Ritual
07. STRATEGY
We propose a Care-Led model: Shifting heritage exposure from a chore into a companionship.
Our Definition
We define the child as an active explorer, not a passive learner.
Our Shift
We replace mechanical Operation with emotional Interactivity.
The Result
Language acquisition becomes a Care-Led Ritual rather than a compliance-based chore.
How?
We designed a bio-physical feedback system grounded in child development research.
