Dr. OU Ying (Nina) studies how media technologies become infrastructure, shaping what people see, remember, and move through, and how those systems can be contested. Her research examines metro systems, vernacular practices, public screens, and XR environments, focusing on how their technical and aesthetic forms structure experience and the futures people can imagine.

She works across critical AI studies, platform studies, urban media studies, and media theory. Screens, interfaces, and feeds are treated as sites where design decisions, institutional interests, and everyday practices meet. This work investigates how media shape the visible and the sensible, conditioning whose voices are heard, whose mobilities are enabled or constrained, and how these conditions affect individual and collective wellbeing.

She has served as a co-investigator or lead collaborator on competitively funded projects in Hong Kong and mainland China, including an ongoing GRF project on the art and technology ecosystems linking Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Her research has been selected for presentation at IAMCR, AoIR, 4S, and SLSA. 

Her academic background includes Japanese language and literature, social work, and sociological research. Her doctoral training at The University of Hong Kong emphasised quantitative social research. She has since extended her work into design and media studies while retaining a broader empirical orientation.

At SCM, she teaches Technofutures: Critical Approaches to the Metaverse, AI, and Blockchain, Social Media Criticism, and Media and Human Experiences. Her research and teaching link critical analysis of technological systems with concern for the wellbeing and agency of those who live with them.