Statement of Purpose

When I entered high school, my parents were working elsewhere, and my sister and I lived in separate school dormitories in Taiwan. We went to our grandmother's home on weekends. Most days consisted of classes, returning to my room, buying a late-night snack, and playing games. I did not yet know what I wanted to do, or what relationship I could build with the world. In my second year, I met a student at a cram school who was developing an app. I began seriously investigating how an idea could become something people could use. Later, a video of a seventeen-year-old building a notebook business helped me see that someone like me could begin making something too.

That curiosity led me to SITCON, self-directed learning communities, and g0v. Through the internet, I met people across generations and backgrounds and encountered opportunities I would not otherwise have found. To me, g0v felt like the temple near my home: people gathered around something they believed in, and I could come after school, help where I could, and gradually get to know them. When I saw the community asking for donations because of financial difficulties, I began to recognize that the environment that had opened up the world to me—and helped me believe I could act—did not simply exist on its own. Behind the support I had taken for granted, people may have been quietly contributing time and resources, bearing costs I had never seen. Much of what I imagined for my future rested on these relationships and resources, yet I had rarely asked how they were sustained or who bore that responsibility. If they changed, what could I draw on to keep acting? I brought this question to Jamie's GapYear Program through a proposal for exploration. I wanted to step outside a familiar environment, understand how it had shaped me, and explore how I could build the capability to help sustain and change the world I was part of.

The program's grant of one million New Taiwan dollars gave me my first opportunity to explore beyond the relationships I had relied on. I visited other communities independently and invested time in learning to make work of my own. In March 2025, using Vibe Coding tools, I built Panic Tracker, followed by What Are You Doing?, an everyday journal. These projects allowed people who did not already know me to encounter me through my work. Later, Panic Tracker (焦慮戳戳樂) reached 40,000 downloads, and Paper Gold (賽博燒金紙) reached 20,000. My first success may have made me doubt myself even more: I was still unsure whether I could do it again. The second made me more certain that this was my own capability, something I could do. By the end of the year, I wanted to keep developing my abilities and understand how the conditions that had helped me believe I could act had come into being.

That inquiry led me to history, political philosophy, and social ontology. I took courses in European imperial history, nationalism, and other political subjects and read Searle and Graeber, trying to understand how the world we share is organized. Which claims do people accept? Which symbols carry shared meaning? Which roles acquire rights, obligations, and the power to act? I became interested in how what a person believes and can do is connected to institutions, relationships, and recurring experiences. These questions also motivated my Civilization essays.

I hope to develop this inquiry into research on how people build capability through their own practice, develop trust in themselves, and become people who can act in civic life. I want to translate that research into tools or platforms that help more people develop this capacity earlier. It took chance encounters, support from communities, and a year of exploration for me to begin finding a direction. I want to understand which of those conditions can be deliberately designed so others can have access to such experiences.

AI has made this question more urgent for me. Since I began using it in November 2022, I have experienced both its possibilities and a contradiction: it can help me finish work faster without necessarily helping me believe in my own abilities. I became accustomed to having AI help with writing and later found myself less confident in my ability to write. App development could feel similar. Publishing a generated result sometimes made it harder to believe that I understood how to make it. These are personal experiences, but they led me to ask: as tools do more of the work, how do people continue developing judgment and capability of their own?

I believe confidence needs to be built through practice. I want to investigate which experiences help people see the relationship between their choices and the results, which interactions encourage them to try again, and how those experiences gradually develop their agency. In AI-assisted creation, how does a person set their own agenda? How do they judge whether a result serves their purpose, and change it when it does not? I want to understand what participation people need to retain to gain, from one completed task, the capability to begin the next.

These questions suggest concrete design possibilities. A writing tool could help someone articulate what they want to say before using AI to develop, compare, and revise it. A making tool could help someone understand which conditions shape a result and practice judgment through modification. I want to explore how these practices can become part of using a tool, so that completing work is also a process of building capability. Outcomes worth investigating include whether people better understand what they want to do, can explain their decisions, and can take the initiative when they encounter another problem.

The system itself also needs mechanisms for self-correction and iteration. People's abilities, purposes, and circumstances change through practice, and the support they receive needs to change with them. I want the system to use each experience as an opportunity to reconsider its earlier arrangements and revise subsequent exercises and interactions. The possibility of continued revision needs to be part of its design.

Here, AI also offers an opportunity. I see the possibility of generating mechanisms during use: shaping the next exercise or interaction around the problem a person faces, what they have already tried, and the direction they want to take. I want to investigate how a system can continue changing as a person develops, and how that person can participate in revising it so that dynamic generation supports their direction and capacity to act.

This research ultimately returns to the world people share. I have organized more than twenty small events with twenty to fifty participants each, and more than ten larger events in the first half of 2026. I am grateful to the people I encountered online who were willing to support me, and I hope more people can contribute to these networks through their own abilities. As people develop capability and confidence, how do they bring an idea into a group, understand others' needs, and find ways to work together? I want to explore how individual agency can develop into a capacity for collective action through these encounters.

I want to develop conditions that help people gradually trust their own abilities and participate in public life. This wish comes from gratitude to the people who supported me and from my hopes for my own future: I want to live in a society where people are willing to do something. I hope younger people can find their direction as they begin participating in society, develop the capacity to act, and work with others to bring the world they believe in into being.