Sylvia Kim’s (PhD 2026) Research Wins Top Award at Immersive Learning Research Network

Sylvia Kim, PhD researcher at the Institute of Design (ID), has been awarded the Best Academic Full Paper Award at the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN) 2025 conference. The paper, “The Impact of Virtual Transition Spaces on Learning Engagement and Memory Retention,” also received the Best Academic Presentation Award.

The team included Sylvia’s advisors, Assistant Professor Zach Pino and Dean Anijo Mathew, whose collaboration helped shape the project’s direction.

Sylvia’s research investigates how strategically designed transition spaces in virtual reality learning environments can dramatically improve educational outcomes. The team’s experiments showed that participants who experienced thoughtfully designed transitions before learning showed significantly better memory retention and engagement compared to control groups.

Sylvia’s research began with spatial studies of transition spaces, building on earlier work by Anijo. A critical evolution came through Sylvia’s collaboration with Zach, whose insights helped expand the research beyond spatial considerations to explore temporal interventions, specifically examining how the timing and pacing of transitions influence cognitive performance and learning outcomes.

The award-winning paper builds on foundational research Sylvia presented at the Design Research Society Conference in 2024, where her paper “Passageways and Portals: A Comparative Analysis of Transition Spaces in Physical, Digital, and Virtual Environments” established the groundwork for subsequent empirical studies.

This line of inquiry also builds on ID’s heritage as The New Bauhaus, suggesting what constructivist learning looks like in an age of AI and data-driven design.

Sylvia’s current work extends these findings into new applications. She’s leading a summer research experiment in collaboration with ID MDes students and the Center for Learning Innovation (CLI) team at Illinois Tech, exploring how transition designs could support diverse learning needs in digital education.

Sylvia recently shared her work at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan, and will be presenting this September at the LearnXDesign 2025 Conference in Aveiro, Portugal, on how transitions can inform digital learning experiences for individuals facing learning challenges.

Sylvia’s work reflects ID’s commitment to developing researchers who can work at the intersection of design, technology, and human experience—positioning the program as a leader in transdisciplinary research that creates meaningful impact through ongoing research sponsorship and partnerships.