We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jiayue Wang a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jiayue, appreciate you joining us today. Going back to the beginning – how did you come up with the idea in the first place?

I am an artist and a designer, and I enjoy bringing my aesthetics and understanding of art to commercial design projects, and I think it’s a must. I love to observe life, and I love and care about what is happening around me, so naturally, I want my designs to be meaningful; I want them to help my clients and my community! This is what design is all about for me, finding problems and solving them through beauty.

At the moment, I don’t have a lot of contact with business because I’m still studying, but I’ve always been interested in this aspect of design. My main focus is on branding and interaction design. I love inclusive branding, and I believe brands have souls and personalities. At the same time, I am also profoundly aware of the rapid development of science and technology, so I have been trying to combine the technology of interaction design with brand design. I don’t think that design disciplines are divided; in fact, I believe they are intertwined and mutually connected, and I love the sparks that appear when art collides in interdisciplinary fields.

Jiayue, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My relationship with design goes back to when I was in elementary school. I became interested in art at a very young age because of hobby classes and school art appreciation classes. In high school, I began to formally contact with the field of painting, dreaming of becoming an oil painter, but because of some practical reasons, the development did not go as I wished, I did not enter the Academy of Fine Arts, and went to a comprehensive university, in the undergraduate stage of the university I came into contact with the field of design, which is a novelty to me, but at the same time, I also feel very confused. I couldn’t realize the meaning of design in the traditional Chinese design education. Even though I had the basic design foundation, found a decent design job, and realized my love for design, I had difficulty in finding my relationship with design and the balance between art and design.

So at the end of my four years of undergraduate study, I decided to go abroad to have a look. After much comparison and weighing, I chose Pratt in New York City, not only because the school’s research and development matched what I was looking for, but also because New York was an attractive city to me. My perception of design, and even the trajectory of my life, changed dramatically. I began to be guided by unconventional concepts, I came into contact with unconscious design, cross-disciplinary, non-human-centered design experiments, but also came into contact with the strong nature of the ground of the commercial design, in the extremely contradictory schedule of the course, I am like a sponge to absorb a constant flow of knowledge, interdisciplinary learning and critical design concepts deeply planted in my mind. I have deeply planted the concepts of interdisciplinary learning and critical design in my cognition. At the same time, I kept visiting various exhibitions in my spare time. All kinds of “beauty” stimulated my eyes. Gradually, I became more and more clear about my future design direction, and I realized that I could not live without design.

I enjoy building deep links with my audience and I look forward to each interaction to help me understand them better. Taking my research project on the education of children with autism as an example, I had related research experiences during my undergraduate years, but when I came to the graduate level, I had a broader perspective and I realized that there were more shortcomings in the output stage of my previous board game project, such as not considering the sustainability of the education of children with autism well and the role parents/teachers need to play as participants in the game. To play as participants in the game, etc. This is a theme that I will continue to delve into.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Read more, experience more, don’t limit yourself to the “design needs to learn” mode of thinking, I’m not saying that design doesn’t need to learn, I want to say is that our life itself is design, we are designing our life, at the same time our life is teaching us design. We need to keep an open attitude to deal with the world, the collision between different ideas is really a wonderful thing.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

That has changed a lot in my past year. In the past, I would feel happy when I came across someone complimenting and enjoying my work. But now I’m more open to hearing people ask questions or make suggestions about my work; these comments are much more appealing to me, and I look forward to hearing different voices. Also seeing that my COMMUNITY can profit from my work is still a big part of what keeps me going!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lesleycontex.cargo.site/
• Instagram: lesley_w_art

Image Credits

Jiayue Wang