Zhengyu Zhao is a speculative design researcher and multi-media technologist. Her expanded practice combines creative coding and visual storytelling to create interactive prototypes—both in virtual 3D spaces and physical installations. Her work blends embodied interaction and poetic abstraction to explore the dynamic tensions between rigid systems and soft human experience.

With a background in film and interdisciplinary design research, Zhengyu draws from self-observation, embodied sensing, and reconstruction as core strategies. She investigates how systems shape our perception of life, and how individuals, in return, can gently re-establish their own rhythm within imposed frameworks. Her approach integrates storytelling as a subtle yet powerful method—restrained, intuitive, and intentionally open-ended. Rather than offering fixed interpretations, her work creates experiential prompts that invite ambiguity, personal resonance, and quiet reflection.

She believes that vitality in design does not emerge from resolution, but from tension—from the unfolding space of questions between a work and those who encounter it.

Her practice asks: How might design help us reimagine our relationship with systems—and the way we perceive and relate to ourselves—not by rejecting structure, but by rhythmically rewriting it from within?