By: Elena Mart

While many designers build for the screen, Yizhen Li builds for the senses.

Her journey began in the world of experience design—meticulously crafting digital flows that help users navigate complexity with ease. But her vision didn’t stop there. Over the past few years, Li has expanded that sensibility into physical space, using her deep understanding of design systems to create immersive installations that invite touch, breath, emotion, and ecological connection.

“Design is not just about problem-solving,” she says. “It’s also about emotional translation. About building relationships.”

A Portfolio of Precision and Poetry

Li’s design career first drew global attention with a series of conceptually rigorous, visually refined digital projects. Soul Palette, a color-emotion interface exploring mental health, won a Silver Award at the Indigo Design Awards. Her later project, WaveLens—a citizen-science diving tool using AI to flag coral bleaching—garnered praise across multiple platforms, earning both a London Design Award and an IDA Design Award in early 2025. In the same season, her interactive storytelling prototype for climate awareness was shortlisted by the LICC Design Awards, praised for “blending spatial interaction, data design, and poetic narrative into a cohesive user experience.”

To Li, these accolades are not endpoints—they are signals. “Awards are just one way of knowing something works,” she reflects. “But the real test is how it feels in someone’s body. How it lives in space.”

From Interface to Installation: Designing for Feeling

This mindset naturally led her from screens into spaces.

Her breakout installation Lava’s Lament, exhibited at Gray Area (San Francisco, 2024), used live seismic data from Hawai‘i to generate a multi-sensory experience: woven lava-fiber curtains pulsed with deep sub-bass audio while projection-mapped visuals undulated across their surface. Visitors had to physically approach—to lean into the fabric, to feel the earth’s tremors translated into tactile frequencies.

Rather than spectacle, the piece offered intimacy. “You’re not watching the Earth,” she explains. “You’re in dialogue with it.”

In 2025, she brought this spatial empathy to Marine Cells at Korea’s CICA Museum. There, high-resolution scans of kelp and coral became floating holograms, layered with ink-wash gestures. A hidden breath sensor detected each visitor’s exhale, causing projected algae to sway in rhythm. The installation collapsed the distance between inner body and outer ecosystem—between breath and tide.

“I wanted people to feel their lungs as part of the ocean’s metabolism,” she says. “Not metaphorically, but physically.”

The Design Mindset, Reframed in Nature

Yizhen’s practice is a rare fusion: grounded in UX research and visual systems, but reaching toward something ancestral, elemental, even mystical. Her creative process weaves East Asian ink aesthetics, ecological sensitivity, and feminist embodiment into structures that feel both futuristic and deeply rooted.

As the founder and artistic director of The Liminal Collective, she’s now developing a new frontier in her work—one that takes place entirely on land. Based in Hawai‘i, her ongoing project Liminal Residency holds space for artists, researchers, and healers to co-create with nature, not just in theory but in practice.

The first edition of the program focuses on the triad Volcano · Rainforest · Ocean, inviting participants into a slower, more reciprocal rhythm of making. From land offerings to shared rituals, every element of the residency is designed to support integration—not productivity. “We don’t just provide a backdrop,” she explains. “We co-compose with the land.”

Rather than the fast-paced demands of production culture, Li’s residency model offers an intentional pause—a space to listen, to sense, and to metabolize experience into expression. The emphasis is not on output, but on orientation: What does it mean to create with a place, rather than just in it?

This approach draws from Indigenous knowledge systems, permaculture ethics, and somatic practices—all woven into a regenerative, artist-led ecosystem that redefines what it means to host, to hold, and to heal through creative process.

A New Era of Experience Design

In an era where design often chases optimization, Yizhen Li’s work returns to feeling. Whether crafting tools for mental health or staging poetic interactions between humans and lava, she brings a rare kind of intelligence—one that listens deeply before it builds.

Across media, across cultures, her practice carries a message: that design can be sensuous, that systems can be soft, and that technology, at its best, reopens the conversation between people and place.

Her next chapter continues this unfolding—not just through exhibitions and digital tools, but through living systems. The Liminal Residency is only the beginning of a longer-term vision: one where land-based programs become seasonal portals for creative reset, and where artists from around the world can step into ecological belonging.

“The world doesn’t need more output,” she says. “It needs more attunement. That’s the kind of design I’m building toward.”