My design education started on quiet afternoons in a café — an older friend, self-taught and already seeing things I hadn't learned to see yet, sitting across from me at a wooden table, pulling up Apple's WWDC keynotes and pausing them frame by frame, showing me how something that looked like a single motion was actually three small ones, layered. That's how I learned what craft was, before I knew the word for it.

After class I'd run to postpost, a bookshop tucked into a Beijing hutong, where design and photography and experimental art books arrived months late from everywhere in the world. I'd sit on the floor turning pages of Japanese magazines I couldn't read, trying to understand why a single image, set against that much white space, could make me hold my breath. One afternoon I pulled three books off the shelf at once — Kenya Hara's Designing Design, Masayuki Kurokawa's The 8 Aesthetic Consciousness of the Japanese, Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows — and read them on the floor until the shop closed. I didn't have language yet for what they were doing to me. I just knew nothing I'd been taught to call good design had felt like this. Those three books took root in me before I had any real practice — a way of understanding design that arrived before the doing.

Later that year, a friend and I built a confession platform for our school — a small digital place where you could leave the things you couldn't say in person. People found each other through it. Someone would read a line and recognize themselves, or recognize someone they hadn't dared to speak to. I didn't have words for it then, but I think that was the first time I understood: a designed space could hold what a person couldn't carry alone.

When UW's design program admitted me, I deferred and went back to Shanghai. Flowith was just starting then; I was one of the first interns. We were trying to make AI feel less like typing into a box — more like arranging thoughts on a table, dragging them next to each other, watching them rearrange themselves. In the same months, a few of us picked up DesignX and rebuilt it into the design community inside X ACADEMY it could be — where product designers, architects, graphic designers, new media artists, and speculative design researchers ended up in the same rooms. We ran hackathons that went two days straight. I remember the last hour — the room half-dark, the countdown on the big screen, someone next to me still adjusting a transition with three minutes left, and no one telling them to stop. We taught each other. We made things together. It lasted a year, and then another year.

At night, after work, I'd sit with Amber and build out the early research of Reality Design Lab — speculative work on what happens when you use XR and AI to look inward. One prototype let you sit with a version of yourself from a memory you hadn't visited in years. Concept, branding, the website, the writing. Core77 and CHI came later.

Somewhere in the middle of it I started returning to SANAA — the way Sejima and Nishizawa could make something as permanent as architecture feel intimate, soft, almost ephemeral. A building that knew how to hold you without asking you to look up. I think that was the year I understood what I wanted my work to do to people.

Sophomore year, back at UW, pursuing a BDes in Interaction Design — and at the same time, falling deep into new media art. I kept making pieces about things that were hard to say out loud. Confession of Wind was a walk-in installation of gauze and projected fog, a small bowl of water lit from below, a heart-rate sensor and a microphone listening to whoever stepped inside; the faster their heart beat, the more the illusions on the gauze melted away — as if the room was asking them to be still enough to dissolve their own weather. I'd written the piece as a poem in Chinese first, about restless wandering becoming belonging. Oblivion came later, a ten-minute audiovisual performance at the DXARTS Fall Concert — not about forgetting, but about what stays after something has faded: a tremor, a shimmer, the afterimage of a closeness that never quite began. One asked the audience to step inside. The other asked them to sit very still and let something pass through them. Somewhere in the making of these, I touched a more honest version of myself — and learned to sit, quietly, with everything I had been carrying. Interaction, for me, walked off the screen.

Onto the body.
Into the room.

Two questions have been following me around this year. The first one came out of a year of research at Studio Tilt with Audrey Desjardins: whether the data we generate every day could be lived with the way you live with the objects in your home, slow and warm and re-encounterable, instead of consumed. The second came out of the Human-Machine Interaction Lab with Laura Luna Castillo, where I learned to orchestrate sound, image, body, and machine in the same room. I started to suspect that the next interface might not be something you type into, but something that responds to how you're already moving. These two questions sit next to me when I work.

But there were slower questions I needed somewhere quieter to ask. I started Poetic Interaction Lab after a sleepless night when I'd stumbled onto a small piece of software called Tame OS — minimal, fluid, somehow tender, the first interface in a long time that didn't feel like it was asking me to perform productivity at it. Something loosened in me. The line I'd written during my gap year — design something that makes you cry and makes you feel alive — stopped feeling embarrassing. The Lab is where I've been trying to articulate it ever since: an in-progress manifesto and a set of working spaces for designing systems that breathe — where the goal isn't usability but communion, where the interface vanishes into feeling, where what gets made is not a product but a field.

I've been lucky, this past year, to find Internet Development Studio — Jimmy and Anastasiya and the people they've gathered around them, who keep encouraging me to push further into where design and technology and aesthetic meet, who've given me real stages to present the ideas and the work and the vision behind them. I'd been carrying these things quietly for a long time. They were the first room where I could put them down out loud.

At X Fusor Design Lab I get to start putting some of this into practice: designing and shipping AI-native products for early-stage startups, using Cursor and Claude alongside Figma, treating vibe coding as part of the design surface itself.

Lately I've been calling this last thread aesthetic engineering — encoding the kind of texture I first felt in that hutong bookshop, in that confession platform, in that fog-filled room, into infrastructure that AI can execute.

It's the thing I want to keep building.

If you've made it this far, and something here stayed with you, I'd love to know you — whether you're hiring, building something quietly that needs another pair of hands, or just thinking through any of these things and want to think them through together.