What kind of ancestor do I want to be?
— everything here grows from that one question.
IN is a small studio built on one idea: personal growth and the wellbeing of the people around us aren't separate things. We call this ME=WE.
Everything we do — workshops, projects with our neighbors, the way we flip + connect — is a way of practicing ME=WE, not just talking about it.
Just a humble posture of learning. We turn to nature, science, art, and social action for a common language, deep-listening and co-creating our way toward it.
IN isn't built to be one centralized organization. It grows through shared practice — those who continue become IN-Collectives, carrying the work forward in their own communities.
Moving into felt experience — noticed, made, and practiced together.
Informed by systemic and relational science — not slogans, but real ways of understanding how we're connected.
Shaped to the needs of each community and context.
What kind of ancestor do I want to be?
This isn't a question for elders alone — it's for everyone, at any age. We're all bridges between who came before us and who comes next.
Think of it less as a declaration and more as a living agreement: nine things we hold to be true for now, held open on purpose. Read it slowly. Then help us change it.
It began with a few of us trying to name what we believe, and it will keep being reshaped by everyone who joins the practice — each one adding a line, questioning another, living it out in their own community and bringing back what they learn.
We're more reachable than any generation before us, and more alone. That's not a contradiction — it's a pattern we've stopped questioning. IN starts by naming it plainly: taking the veils off, without judgment, and relearning how to actually listen.
Growing as a person and caring for the people around you were never two separate projects. Like a Möbius strip, what looks like two sides — self and society — is one continuous surface. Once you see it, the old choice between them disappears.
No one holds the whole elephant in the dark room — not from lack of insight, but because every vantage point is partial by nature. So we look from many sides, on purpose, together. In our workshops, this isn't a discussion. It's a discipline.
Waste, treated as fine. The gap between rich and poor, treated as inevitable. Isolation, absorbed until it feels ordinary. Wars, watched from a safe distance. These aren't oversights — they're agreements we made without noticing. We choose to notice.
This is the hardest part, and the most courageous. Letting go of ego, prejudice, judgment — not once, but daily, in how we think, speak, and act. It's not unnatural. Bone restructures. Atoms rearrange. Growth has always worked this way.
ME=WE isn't taught — it's practiced, in workshops and real projects with real neighbors, drawing on nature, science, art, and social action, across generations and fields that rarely share a room. The framework was never the point. What shifts between people is.
Empathy isn't installed — it's already there, built into what it means to be human. Everyone who comes through IN carries a birthright and a responsibility to help others thrive. Every person leads their own path. No one waits in the wings.
What any one of us can do is small, and bounded by time. That's exactly why we build bridges, not monuments: between our own higher self and our communities, between the generation before us and the one still arriving.
When we find something good, we share it — a recipe, a remedy, a way through something hard. This is that, at the scale of a life. Small, contagious practice, carried person to person, adding light where it's needed.
Before IN had a name, it had a question — how do ME and WE actually grow together? We never answered it in theory. We practiced our way toward it: trying something real, listening to what came back, and letting each attempt teach us the next.
One design student became a collective, reaching across art, design, and the wider university — then youth in the UAE and Nepal, growing alongside one another, discovering a relationship could hold across two very different countries. A university garden turned into a living lab.
The practice kept asking more of us. In Canada it stretched to the scale of a whole county — a Pathfinder facilitator series and a ME=WE exploration of race and unity — testing whether relationship could be practiced not just in a room, but across a community.
In 2022, IN took root in Korea, and something shifted: IN-Collectives from around the world found each other, and a new way of working together began — online and face to face, across the USA, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and Korea — each exploring what ME=WE can mean.
Full descriptions of each project live on their Community and Project pages.
The seeds were older than IN itself — first planted in Yunsun Chung's work co-founding tasmena, a community design association, and GYEM (Global Youth Empowerment). What began as one person's question keeps becoming everyone's practice — woven through action, interaction, and aspiration.
Research & Recognition
The ME=WE framework has been shared through peer-reviewed work and international forums: a Springer handbook chapter, “Self, Society, Service in ME=WE” (2024); “Co-Designing a Pathway Through Food Revolution for Social Change” (2021); “Co-designing a social innovation model for changemakers” (2018); and a youth-empowerment case study (Banff / RSD, 2015). Presented at Dubai EXPO 2020 and the Parliament of the World's Religions 2022.