Jing Wang

Where do you live: Currently, I am living in San Francisco.
Your education: M.Des in Interaction Design; M. Arch.
Describe your art in three words: Metaphorical, Heuristic, Emblematic.
Your Discipline:
Current: Visual Art, UX Design, Product Design, Design Strategy, Service Design.
Previous: Architectural Design.
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Your background spans UX design, art, and architecture. How do these disciplines influence each other in your work?

User-centered experience design, as its name indicates, is a design field to solve problems through respecting, highlighting, and prioritizing users’ needs and wants. So, it naturally focuses on people’s feelings, behaviors, habits, etc., and it is a very comprehensive discipline. For me, UX is more than just design; it’s a methodology—a way of switching to various stakeholders’ perspectives, combining different thinking abilities, uncovering essence from the surface, design delightful, sleek, engaging, and meaningful user experiences with strategies integrated. It has given me a deeper understanding of how people respond to dynamic environments. 

With a background in architectural design, I’ve always been sensitive to urban context, space, light and shadow, and the environmental art. UX design has further expanded my understanding of how people interact in a city, not just functionally but also emotionally, experientially, and behaviorally. 

Art lies as the foundation of both fields. Over years of practice in design and art, I see art as not only a source of inspiration for design taste and sensibilities, but also as a way of thinking. This thinking process has also enriched my art creation, allowing my work to be exhibited globally and gain recognition.

Jing Wang | Art NO.1 | The Hidden Genes of City

Can you tell us more about your belief that ‘thinking must come before the work itself’? How does this perspective shape your creative process?

I believe the vitality of an artwork lies in its ability to offer a unique lens to see the world. This embodies the exploratory, critical, and creative nature of an artwork. Humans are shaped by society, with their environment playing a key role in shaping their perceptions, thoughts, behaviors, as well as their limitations. Art, however, can transcend the limitations of time and space, conveying its unique perspective to viewers and inspiring profound reflections. This is the vitality and value of the artworks.  

Thanks to my UX design experience. It has further enhanced and deepened my understanding of things in different levels. At its core, design is about solving problems by digging beneath the surface, breaking down complexities, and unveiling, reconciling, or fixing underlying key challenges in the system and human nature. A designer’s sensitivity to what’s flawed or unreasonable is crucial. 

For me, art is not just an expression. It merges critical, heuristic, creative thinking ingeniously and unrestrainedly. It can also be strategic, holistic, exploratory, and human-centered. Art is thinking itself. More importantly, art reveals our hidden feelings from the subconscious and presents them in front of us intuitively. As a designer, this is extremely important to us, because the hidden feelings uncover the things that need to be aware of, and only when we are aware, we will explore and think and make corresponding adjustments to improve the design.  

This thinking process equally empowers my art creation. The dynamic, multifaceted, logical, exploratory, and critical nature of thinking, combined with the non-linear, concurrent and intuitive nature of sensibility, are directly reflected in my artworks, making them more thought-provoking, exploratory, and meaningful.

Jing Wang | Art NO.2 | The Connection VS Disconnection

You’ve received multiple prestigious awards this year. How do these recognitions impact your approach to future projects?

This year, I’ve been received multiple prestigious awards. I’m truly happy and deeply appreciative, as they represent meaningful recognitions of my design ability.

The project that received most of the awards this year is a B2B market intelligence platform with a vision to help businesses in achieving a seamless energy transition. This design fully respects and embraces the iterative nature of researching, empowers users on making informed decisions with greater flexibility and precision. 

In this project, I delved deeply into users’ pain points across different levels, leveraging the latest AI technology and designing interconnected feedback loops and multiple end-user controls with interactive data visualization for an intuitive, efficient, and inspired user experience. This design was proven to increase user engagement rate, retention rate, and received multiple positive user feedback. I believe that’s why I got recognition and won the awards. 

In my view, the ability to uncover essence beneath the surface through thorough analysis of user pain points, recognize and respect the nature of human behavior, emotion, and psychological activities, design and improve strategies and mechanisms through continuous testing and observation is the key of impactful UX design. Moving forward, my future UX design projects will continue to follow these principles, fostering critical insights to drive creative problem-solving.

I also believe that it’s essential to approach every project with an open mind — an empty-cup mindset. While past experiences and methods are valuable, they should never turn into limitations. Each project requires a multidimensional perspective that is specific to its target user group. Beyond understanding users’ pain points, needs and wants, knowing the dynamic interplay between a product and its market ecosystem with a developing mindset is crucial, especially as the characteristics of the target user group may evolve over time. 

Therefore, the empty-cup mindset is vital, which helps me adopt the proper design methods to solve problems creatively. For example, in my latest UX design project, Pattern Leap, after rounds of user research, I identified the gap between cultural awareness and cultural experience; besides analyzing through creating user journeys and mind maps, I employed the art creation process to rethink the cultural ecosystems of cities, which included but was not limited to local businesses, communities, cultural gene accessibility, sense of curiosity and exploration, interpersonal interaction, and their dynamic influence on daily experiences. This artistic approach not only inspired my design thinking and helped me to find leverage points across dimensions and dynamics, but also seamlessly incorporated the artworks into the design, creating a fun, engaging, and shareable user experience.

Jing Wang | Art NO.3 | Walking Path A & A Smile Face

In your work, you emphasize the importance of cultural and historical experience in the AI era. How do you integrate these elements into your designs?

In my design work, cultural and historical elements are not just visual components; they play a key role in designing the cultural ecosystem and the corresponding user journey. The deep purpose is to foster well-established cultural awareness and integrate cultural experiences into the details of public mass’ daily life.

In my Pattern Leap UX design project, local businesses, art workers, and the general public coexist and flourish within the designed cultural ec

Additionally, these cultural interactions, seamlessly woven into daily life, help businesses in the city flourish. Business and culture can complement and enhance one another, and culturally empowered commerce gains deeper significance and enduring vitality in the AI era. While some cultural tags might provoke questions, discussions, or even criticism, this is an essential part of building cultural awareness and enriching cultural experiences. In a broader sense, Pattern Leap plays a role both as a buffer zone and a bridge, driving the meaningful integration of business and culture, fostering their mutual success.

My art creation practice, as a way to think through UX design, allows me to creatively and intuitively piece together various elements flexibly, prompting me to reflect deeply on the insights derived from these combinations. In my artworks, rather than depicting everyday objects we commonly encounter, I go directly to the roots and use well-known historical and cultural symbols: the patterns, to arouse cultural awareness and broader human experience: we connect with the world through all dimensions.

Could you share more about your project ‘Interpreting Time through Interaction and Media’ and its exhibition at the Memor Museum?

In the “Interpreting Time through Interaction and Media” exhibition at the Memor Museum, both my Pattern Leap artworks and UX design project were displayed. To align more closely with the exhibition’s theme, the content focused on two time dimensions: exclusive individual timeline — emphasizing the uniqueness of personal cultural experiences and their intersections within a single day of city life; and inclusive cultural timespan — linking cultural roots from various eras and regions worldwide through engagement with cultural symbols and symbols derivatives. 

The showcased video included a story of a couple meeting for the first time on a date at a modern Islamic restaurant. Through scanning the restaurant’s Pattern Leap QR code, they accessed and discussed the modern Islamic design and its cultural and historical genes, successfully breaking the ice and enjoying their first date. This example illustrates my interpretation of “Interpreting Time through Interaction and Media”: media can serve not only as an interactive object but also as a bridge that fosters meaningful and positive interpersonal interactions, deepening mutual understanding and appreciation.  

My aspiration is to forge meaningful connections among people through the shared cultural and historical exploration, enabling to have a broader sense of human experience in the detail of daily life. In turn, this expansive cultural engagement, transcending time and place, empower cities with strong cultural confidence by creating positive synergies among local businesses, art networks, broader communities, and daily life experiences.

Jing Wang | Art NO.4 | Walking Path B & An Expecting Profile

You mentioned that walking through the city connects us to cultural symbols. How does this idea manifest in your work?

Through extensive user research, I discovered that having cultural information in our lives and being aware of it are two different things. This led me to reflect: what causes such a gap between cultural awareness and cultural experience? Is it because we are too busy to notice, or due to a lack of fundamental cultural and historical knowledge accessibility? One thing is undeniable—only with well-established cultural awareness can cultural experiences truly thrive in our daily lives. Therefore, finding the anchor point that integrates culture into people’s everyday lives is essential. 

Pattern is an art form, it shows as cultural and historical symbols and symbol derivatives. The common pattern we encounter daily, more or less, can be traced back to one or more relevant historical and cultural information, or could be regarded as their intersections and derivatives. It is the perfect anchor point to connect us with diverse cultures in details of our daily lives. 

Through the art creation process, I explored how people in a city engage with cultures from different times and places through patterns. This engagement in my UX design can happen through appreciation, dining, shopping, communicating, etc. As long as these experiences involve patterns, or the products or businesses are part of the Pattern Leap network, users can access the corresponding cultural genes behind patterns anytime, anywhere. 

Beyond inspiring my UX design work, my artworks ultimately became an integral part of it. Combined with location tracking function (once users enable it), users can map out their “pattern journey” for the day based on their walking routes. Users can also share their pattern journeys with friends, and if their friends also use Pattern Leap, they can overlap their journeys to see if they’ve had similar cultural experiences. This not only adds an element of fun but also enhances interactivity in their cultural lives. Each pattern journey can be saved as a unique cultural keepsake, which is deeply personal and closely tied to the users’ life experience.

With rapid advancements in AI, where do you see the role of human creativity in future design?

It’s undeniable that AI demonstrates remarkable creative capabilities, but whether it can effectively solve human-centered problems within complex, multidimensional, and ever-changing environments remains uncertain. As everything is constantly evolving, AI—reliant on existing data—may struggle to adapt to the transformative shifts that AI itself brings to the ecosystems. Human needs and wants, both basic and profound, will also evolve with the impact of AI. As a silicon-based life form of the future, AI’s understanding of humans might disconnect over time due to the lack of concurrent data on newly emerging human experiences and needs. Thus, human creativity will remain vital in design as long as the targeted audience is human.

Likewise, AI’s creative outputs and its ability to endow artworks with meaning cannot be equated. In the AI age, the value of art will be redefined; while technology will influence it, the value system will be still determined by humans. Therefore, I believe that human creativity will continue to be indispensable, whether in design or art.