Sunny Sun

I'm Sunny, a senior at Stanford studying Symbolic Systems with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction.

I've been building things since before I had the vocabulary for it: fashion sketches at 8, a Wix site for my YouTube channel at 11, then whatever tool I needed next, Photoshop, Figma, After Effects, Blender. I was never that interested in the tools. I wanted the thing I was making to exist.

CS147 is where that turned into actual practice. My team built Stitch, an AI matching platform that helps small businesses co-host community events. We started with user interviews on University Ave and ended with a working React Native app on a live Gemini backend, and it won Best Poster on demo day. It's still the closest thing to the work I want to be doing.

The part I care about most is the gap between what people say and what they actually mean. During needfinding for Stitch, a customer told us she really wanted to support small businesses, then said she buys 90% of her goods from big chains. We built the product around that contradiction.

I've gone looking for that in a few places: UX research at Google and Spotify, and PM internships at Hatch Sleep, Nectar Social, and Beijing Powersoft Technology. Powersoft is the one that changed how I think. Building for a market I didn't grow up in, with different team dynamics and different assumptions about users, showed me how much of what I called good design was really just design for people I already understood.