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Hojung Kim is an assistant professor in the School of Interior Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and co-founder of MM Lab. His transdisciplinary research examines the cultural, ecological, and socioeconomic dimensions of material practice, with a focus on craft and industrial production in Southeast Asia. Treating materials as social and ecological actors and heritage as part of industrialization, he asks how designers can return material knowledge from the specification to the hand, site, and season it came from.

Over five years of ethnographic and participatory research in craft villages in Vietnam and Thailand, Kim has worked with artisans as collaborators, documenting how vernacular techniques endure and adapt under industrialization and pairing the artisans’ tacit knowledge with digital fabrication to develop hybrid methods. Through hands-on material research, he experiments with local raw materials that craft communities can build with. His teaching carries this work into international studios connecting the United States with the Global South and South Korea, as well as design-build projects with community partners in Knoxville.

Before teaching full-time, Kim practiced as an architect, project manager, and designer at Rockwell Group, Perkins Eastman, and Project Space in New York City and at Moore Ruble Yudell in Los Angeles. His collaborative work has been supported by an Experimental Fellowship with Bauhaus Earth, a Graham Foundation grant, and the James Musgraves Award. His honors include the Mosaic of Excellence Award and recognition as a James Johnson Dudley Faculty Scholar and an ASID Ones to Watch Scholar.