Donor
Swire Group
The Professorship was established through a donation by the Swire Group made initially for the naming of the School of Design, then replaced with the establishment of the Professorship in 1994.
Appointee
Professor Lee Kun-pyo
Prof. Lee Kun-pyo is Dean of School of Design and Chair Professor of Industrial Design. He graduated from the Chung-Ang University with a Bachelor of Fine Art. He then received a Master of Science in Design from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in The United States of America where he was only one of the two Korean scholars selected nationwide for the Scholarship Program of the Korean Ministry of Education. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in Design from the University of Tsukuba in Japan.
Before joining The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Prof. Lee has a long term relationship with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) since 1988. During his time at KAIST, he was appointed as Head of the Department of Industrial Design for 10 years. He was also the Director of the Human-Centered Interaction Design Lab.
During 2010 to 2013, Prof. Lee set the highest marks of achievement in industry through his leadership as the Executive Vice President and Chief Design Officer in the Corporate Design Center of the LG Electronics in Korea where he heavily promoted the advancement of user experience design and design research. He received the highest academic recognition by being the first in Asia to be appointed as Honorary Fellow of the Design Research Society (DRS) where he is also one of the 10 Honorary Fellows in the long history of DRS.
Prof. Lee is an internationally renowned and prominent scholar and his research is focused on human-centered design. He has published extensively in more than 80 international and domestic journal publications and has more than 200 successful conference submissions. He has also established or headed numerous academic societies for the development and scholarship of design research. Most notably, he was the co-founder of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) where he is the President Emeritus. He had served as the President of the Korea Society of Design Science and the Korean Society for Emotion and Sensibility, as well as the Vice President of the Ergonomics Society of Korea. Prof. Lee is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Archive of Design Research, as well as the Editorial Board Member of top tier journals such as Design Studies, International Journal of Design, She Ji, and Journal of Design, Business & Society.
The Endowed Professorship will help Professor Lee and his team to build up future strategy of design education and research regarding new paradigm of the Fourth Industrial Revolution including Artificial Intelligence (AI). User studies will be carried out to identify the new type of design methods and tools for AI technology that contribute to the development of the general guidelines on future design education and research.
