Register now for Final Show events
Register now for Final Show events
Register now for Final Show events
Register now for Final Show events
I am a multidisciplinary creative. I enjoy cross-disciplinary collaboration and believe that creativity and imagination have the power to promote social change.
My background is in product design and I graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China. After graduating, I worked in the intelligent manufacturing industry first as a product designer and then in the social innovation industry as a project manager. I undertook long-term fieldwork on ecology and poverty in the mountains of southwest China and it was this experience that led me to study Service Design at the RCA. During my time at the RCA, I also received some business training, attended the Entrepreneurial Journey course and Imperial Innovation Challenge course at Imperial College Business School, as well as the Behavioural Economics and Decision Making course at London Business School.
In addition to my practice and training in design and business, I have also been working on art projects, including paintings, experimental materials and installations.
I see design as a window to explore and understand the world, and as a tool that can be used to make society more better.
I see art as a path to self-exploration, as well as a way to bring care and healing to myself and others through it.
In my work, I use design thinking to build skeletons and metaphors to weave skin. I want to explore a poetic service, or art with a spirit of service.
Canal Dream synthesizes post-pandemic wellbeing, creative practice, and asset regeneration. Connecting the UK's most vibrant creative assets to declining canal assets through a moving Dream Boat. Using London's canal network as a frame and the Regent's Canal as a place to implement measures, we unite different disciplines of Dream-makers (freelance creatives) to develop a range of dream services (creative practices) along the waterways, including moving theatre, moving workshops, moving events, moving movies... in order to bring comfort to residents, vitality to the community, and care to the city; and also to give freelance creatives the opportunity to create and connect to the society; in addition, to explore the possibility of transforming the canal, an industrial asset of the past, into a creative and cultural space of the future.
Socialising is an important factor affecting the financial situation of emerging adults, both in real life and virtually on social media, and the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) mentality often leads them to overspend and thus always struggle to balance their social life and personal financial management.
To help emerging adults cope with the financial pressures of FOMO, we have developed Beacome, a goal-based (set-plan-approach-achieve) peer support community. The strategy of Beacome is to counteract negative FOMO by creating positive FOMO.
Beacome combines a service framework with specific behaviour change models and a peer support model, which will not only help to achieve short-term goals, but also help young people to develop better consumption habits and make better decisions in the long term.
“Few things symbolise the way our cities have transformed more than canals. ”
-Chris Michael, Cities editor
For my final project, I am working on the innovation of the British waterways, using the network of canals and the narrowboats that float on them as a starting point to develop a narrative project that relates to the history of ecology and humanity, care and healing.
The current project focuses on how might we use the narrowboat as the entry point, the waterway as the thread, and the canal ecosystem as the framework to explore the potential opportunities for the canal revolution in Britain?
Why canals? It starts with looking at the canal through the perspective of a service designer. Narrow boats connect humans to nature, and narrow boats floating all the way down the canal connect communities to communities. The canal has great value and rich possibilities in different aspects such as ecology, humanity and business. Another reason for my interest in canals has to do with my past experiences. Before coming to London, I lived for a long time on the banks of the Tonghui River, the starting point of the old Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, and walking along the river formed one of the most comfortable parts of my daily life. Now that I am in London, I often have a sense of nostalgia across space and time when I walk along the Regent's Canal. So not only do I see this project as my final project for my MA, I also see it as my way of exploring and understanding London.
In 2022, I will walk along the canal as a way to explore a city, to understand a city, to engage with a city and to serve a city. And this exploration is itself an exploration of identity and a dialogue with self and the past.
Join me for a walk and a chat along the canal.
All seasons and all weather are welcome :)
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