Sunny Sun

I'm Sunny, a junior 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, and a slow obsession with teaching myself whatever tool I needed next, from Photoshop and Figma to After Effects and Blender. The throughline was never the tool. It was always the thing I was trying to make.

At Stanford, that instinct found a framework. In CS147, my team built Stitch from scratch, an AI matching platform that helps small businesses co-host community events. We went from zero user interviews on University Ave to a functioning React Native app with a live Gemini-powered backend, and won Best Poster on demo day. That project showed me exactly the kind of work I want to do.

What I care about most in that process is the gap between what users say and what they actually mean. In needfinding for Stitch, a customer told us she deeply wanted to support small businesses, then admitted she buys 90% of her goods from big chains. That contradiction was the whole product.

I've tested that instinct across different contexts: UX research at Google and Spotify, and PM internships at Hatch Sleep, Nectar Social, and Beijing Powersoft Technology. The China experience in particular changed how I think. Building for a completely different market, with different team dynamics and user assumptions, made me realize how much “good design” is really just “design for people you already understand.”