Human Tech Under Martial Law: Lightsticks, Flags, Prepayment & BARAM

What do moments of crisis reveal about how people really connect, and how can experience designers learn from it?

On 3 December 2024, South Korea lived through a surreal night: martial law declared, then overturned within hours. What emerged in the streets wasn’t violence – it was K-pop lightsticks, hand-drawn meme flags, and prepaid cups of warm coffee left for strangers.

Drawing on decades of experience research and his own witness of Korea’s recent political upheaval, Jooseok explores these fragile, powerful “human technologies” and what they teach us about designing experiences that make room for people to become the protagonists.

Key takeaways:

• A backstage context-mapping method for any audience.
  A reusable way to map the “hidden layers” behind behaviour – from 1980–90s democracy movements to 2002 World Cup streets, 2016 candlelight protests and the 2024–25 “revolution of light”. You’ll leave with questions you can use to surface your own city’s historical layers before you design.
• A lens for reading symbols as human tech, not props.
  How to treat K-pop lightsticks, meme flags, and prepaid cups of warm coffee as serious interfaces for emotion, identity and care – and how to run the same analysis on the objects, memes, and habits your audiences already bring from home.
• Design prompts for when people refuse to follow the script.
  Concrete prompts to redesign one current project so it anticipates where people will really move: from staying home to coming out, from standing still to studying under streetlights, from consuming to organising heated buses and late-night snacks for strangers.
• A pattern library for bottom-up solidarity hacks.
  Transferable patterns from Korea’s winter nights – from foil-blanket “Kisses” cheering squads to anonymous donors sending heated buses – that you can adapt to festivals, museums, cities and brands without copying the politics.
• A sharper definition of “human tech” for experience makers.
  A way to distinguish between digital tools and the human technologies of time, risk and shared belief – plus a closing question set you can use with your team: “Where will we let people become the protagonists here?”

About Jooseok Oh:

Jooseok Oh is a Seoul-based Experience Orchestrator, self-described Neo Polymath, and founder of BARAM Experience. With thirty years across branding and organisational consulting, he has built his practice around a single conviction: that connecting Brand Experience, Customer Experience, and Employee Experience requires not just strategy, but orchestration.

He holds two doctoral degrees but stays firmly in the field, working as a Fractional CXO partner across tech, luxury, content, education, and public sectors – using data to set direction and humanities to move people. His work helps leaders translate brand purpose into designed encounters that last.

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Timings:

Campfire #1 is suitable for those in the APAC region or Europe, but everyone is welcome! Here’s when we kick off in your time zone:

• London: 9:55 – 11:25 (BST)
• Paris: 10:55 – 12:25 (CEST)
• Dubai: 12:55 – 14:25 (GST)
• Mumbai: 14:25 – 15:55 (IST)
• Shanghai / Singapore: 16:55 – 18:25 (CST/SGT)
• Tokyo: 17:55 – 19:25 (JST)
• Sydney: 18:55 – 20:25 (AEST)
• Auckland: 20:55 – 22:25 (NZST)