Experiential Design Through the Lens of Mingyang He That Feel Natural and Unnoticed

What makes this recognition so meaningful to me is that it validates my core design value: a great experience doesn't instruct, it simply nudges people to grow quietly. This award affirms that design rooted in emotional connection can create that kind of quiet impact, and gives me greater confidence to keep pursuing work that genuinely moves people from the inside out. It also provides a meaningful platform for my perspective as a multidisciplinary designer to gain wider visibility.

This is the first design award I've received, and it marked a genuine milestone in my design career. Beyond that, this achievement gave Curio the credibility that makes it easier to bring into conversations with potential investment partners who can help bring this conceptual work to life. Right now, I'm using this momentum to prepare Curio for a public launch, and this award feels like exactly the right direction to build.

Experimentation is fundamental to how I design. I never want to build something on assumptions. User interviews are not just a validation step for me, they're often where the most unexpected directions come from. With Curio, early interviews completely reframed my assumptions about motivation and habit-building, and it pushed the concept in ways I never would have arrived at alone. 

Experimentation continues into the prototype phase too. A/B testing different interaction flows helped me understand what actually resonated emotionally with the users versus what I simply thought would work. That gap between designer intention and user reality is where the most honest design decisions happen, and I've learned to be as curious about being wrong as I am about being right.

Honestly, my most unusual source of inspiration is just people. I don't just conduct interviews with a script. I love observing people from a distance, watching how they interact with the space, where they pause, what catches their attention and what doesn't. There's so much design insight in those unscripted moments that a formal research setting could never capture. 

But my favorite is dropping random small talk with strangers because a casual conversation with someone I may never meet again can give me a more genuine perspective than almost any structured method. People are remarkably honest when there's nothing at stake. For a designer obsessed with understanding human behavior, the world is really just a giant and ongoing research study.

One thing I wish more people understood is that the most important design work happens before anything is designed. People tend to see the final product: the polished interface, the seamless interaction, the elegant layout, and assume that's where the efforts lived. But the real work is in the research, the observation, the unexpected questions you ask before a single pixel is placed in the canvas.

Honestly, as an early-career designer, this is something I'm still learning and I think it's a lifelong learning process, no matter where you are in your career. What I've come to understand so far is that compromise doesn't have to mean surrender. 

From my experience, when client expectations and creative visions don't immediately align, the real work is to find the mutual goal underneath for both. What I've also started to appreciate is that constraints aren't the death of creativity. It's rare that pure creative freedom pushes you further than a constraint that pulls you away from where you started. Some of my most interesting design decisions have come from working within limitations I initially resisted.

The biggest challenge was designing for something deeply abstract because curiosity is not a feature you can build but a feeling you have to cultivate. Translating that into a concrete UX system felt almost contradictory at first, because the moment you overbuild an experience meant to feel spontaneous, you lose the very thing you were trying to create.

The way I worked through it was to go back to people. The early user interviews were humbling: 85% of participants described feeling stuck in mundane routines, lacking the motivation to even get started, let alone sustain it. That research grounded the design in real emotional territory and gave me a framework to build from: five emotional triggers that could create a retention loop without ever feeling forced.

The other challenge was constraint. Knowing when to pull back, when to let users breathe, and when to add more would actually undermine the quiet impact I was aiming for. That tension between doing enough and doing too much is honestly something I'm still learning, but Curio taught me that the most powerful design decisions are often the ones you choose not to make.

When I hit a creative block, I just step away from screens entirely. For me, the best creative reset is physical, such as surfing, bouldering, or just driving down the California coast with no particular destination. There's something about being in a completely different kind of problem-solving mode that quietly untangles whatever the mind has been stuck on.

The value I infuse into my design most consistently is empathy but specifically the kind of empathy that comes from observations rather than assumptions. Growing up moving between cultures and building a cross-disciplinary career taught me that there is rarely one single way people experience the world. That awareness just shows up in everything I design as the constant push to consider who might be left out, and what it would take to make everyone feel included.

My advice is to never design for design's sake, but always anchor your work in genuine human experience. That starts with becoming a great observer before becoming a great maker. 

From there, stay open across disciplines. Some of the most valuable design thinking comes from unexpected places, such as a different field, an unfamiliar medium, or a constraint you resist. Broadening how you see the world will always expand what you're capable of creating. And embrace the countless iterations because design is never a linear path. The detours and doubts are not obstacles, they are the key to the final outcome.

If I could collaborate with any designer, it would be Refik Anadol. His work lives at the intersection of data, AI, and immersive spatial experience, which feels like the most exciting thing for someone like me, who is always looking to push across disciplines. 

A collaboration with Refik would push me to think about how interaction design and spatial storytelling can operate at the most expansive scale possible, and how data-driven systems can become tools for genuine emotional connection rather than just visualization. For a designer sitting at the crossroads of physical space and digital experience, this seems like the best practice for me to move forward.

I wish people would ask: "How do you know when a design is finished?" 

My answer would always be: it's finished when it stops feeling like design. Not when every pixel is perfect, but when the experience has become so natural that the users never once think about the hand that shaped it behind. That's the standard I hold myself to, and honestly, it's a standard you can never fully reach, which is exactly what keeps me going. 

Most design feedback lives at the surface: is it beautiful? Is it usable? But the question I'm always asking underneath is: does it make someone feel something they didn't expect to feel? Does it quietly shift the way they see themselves or the world, even just a little? That's the work I care about most. And I wish more people asked about that invisible layer because that's where I live as a designer.