Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Xiaobi (Iris) Pan. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Xiaobi (Iris), looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Love Cassette (https://irispan.net/lovecassette) is a first-of-its-kind interactive Installation that turns one’s love message into a sound-wave postcard on the spot.

We all have friends, families or lovers that we hold dear, but few of us feel comfortable telling them how much we care. For some, a chance to help express their love is all they need.

Love cassette is an interactive installation that is intended to add sweetness into our life. It can hear one’s love message, and turn it into a postcard on the spot. When the postcard is given to friends or family members, they can scan the QR code on the card and hear the original love message stored “on the cloud”.

This sound-interactive installation creates both a digital and physical platform for different social groups to express their love and connect with each other.

As online shopping grows, brick and mortar stores have to come up with new features to attract consumers. Love Cassette is an answer to that. The whole experience constructs a closed-loop business system of both online and offline marketing.

Not only can it attract customers to the physical store to interact with the “cassette”, Love Cassette itself generates more revenue by selling unique, customized sound-wave necklaces based on one’s love-soundwave patterns.

The design of Love Cassette is informed by the site constraints of various shopping malls, the on-site study of customer behavior, and most importantly, guided by human-centered design principles. For example, in order to encourage customers to share their feelings of love in a public place, the cassette is designed to have an acrylic divider in the middle which separates both sides and creates a semi-private space for people to feel comfortable speaking out their love messages. Also, Love Cassette is designed with a state-of-the-art level of accessibility and inclusivity so that people of any age, gender, heights, or tech-savviness would know how to interact with it intuitively.

To this date, “Love Cassette” interactive installation has received over half a million visitors, and generated a revenue of 2.8 million RMB (approximately $400,000). It opened the trend of offline + online integrative interaction and personalizable interactive experience being embedded in shopping malls, museums, or creative markets globally.

Xiaobi (Iris), love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started my design journey as a design student specializing in Industrial Design. Upon completion of my undergraduate studies, I seamlessly transitioned into the realm of User Experience Design. This transition was facilitated by the burgeoning mobile internet industry in the 2010s in China at the time, which presented abundant opportunities within the field of UX design.

Following several years dedicated to app and web design, an opportunity arose for me to conceive and develop a pioneering sound interactive installation for a friend’s establishment. This creation, subsequently known as Love Cassette (https://irispan.net/lovecassette), garnered widespread acclaim for its innovative concept, transforming individuals’ expressions of love into tangible sound-wave postcards in real-time and making it a self-sustained business loop integrating online marketing with offline interaction and shopping. Serendipitously, this project led me into the realm of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Physical Computing.

Reflecting on this trajectory, I inadvertently became a trailblazer in the development of holistic, cross-platform interactive consumer experiences across China and Asia. Following the success of Love Cassette and a series of other interactive projects, I pursued advanced studies at Harvard Graduate School of Design, focusing on the integration of emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), robotics, and smart computational materials into design practice.

Upon completing my master’s program, I took on a senior designer role at Mastercard’s Innovation Lab, where I spearheaded the New Interface Group. In this capacity, I spearheaded experimentation with cutting-edge technologies spanning 5G connectivity, gaming, voice interaction, AR/VR, AI, Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing. This tenure yielded numerous socially impactful innovations, including initiatives such as the Priceless Planet Coalition aimed at environmentally conscious consumer behavior and pioneering projects like the Mastercard Virtual Unattended Store.

Presently, I serve as Lead Designer at Amazon, focusing on revolutionizing mobile shopping experiences through the integration of Augmented Reality, Computer Vision, and AI technologies.

Besides my role at Amazon, I like to write, make music, and saber to my custom songs in Virtual Reality. My writings on design, technology and their social implications have influenced over 10 million readers worldwide.

In year 2024, I co-founded HMW (How Might We) Design Studio (https://www.hmwdesign.studio/) with my partner Junru (Jennie) Xu, and new media company SeeLove Technology with my cofounder Amy Liu. HMW Design Studio is dedicated to shaping a future where creativity serves as a catalyst for positive social change. With a focus on impact-driven design innovation, the studio crafts experiences that are both forward-looking, and deeply grounded in today’s societal challenges. We look at social problems such as environmental protection, healthcare, charity giving, parental care, animal health, etc., and seek creative ways to tackle these challenges through collaborative design and design thinking. On the other side, my company SeeLove Technology is committed to helping people enrich and preserve their “special moments” in life, be it weddings ceremonies, birthday parties, anniversaries, or any other sorts, through new media and technologies.

I’m also an active member of the global design community, giving talks at various universities to design cohorts and contributing to a list of international design competitions as a jury member. I hope to bring my unique background, perspective, and design philosophy to the design world and be a force for change.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Throughout the years, I’ve found two underlying themes in my work. Interestingly, most of them actually revealed themselves to me through chance encounters, rather than being an active choice of mine. Hence, I regard that as some mysterious sort of “fate” or “poetic serendipity” which also have happened to a lot of creative individuals, allegedly. It may be a form of expression of the higher self, as stated by the book “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron.

The two underlying themes are 1) connecting people through technology. Inspire, delight and inject a sense of hope or humor in people through “affective computing” and human-centered interactions. 2) Connecting the digital with physical. Create hybrid experiences that bridge the two worlds into a digital reality or one tangible interface.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Many of my followers found me initially through a platform called Zhihu, or as we know it, the Chinese version of Quara with a whopping monthly active user base of 110.1 million.

I started writing about Design, Technology, Arts, Self Improvement, and various other topics around 2015. During that time, a friend of mine share a question from Zhihu asking about interactive installations, since she thought I might be able to answer that question and share my work, Love Cassette as a fresh example. That’s how I started writing on Zhihu, purely out of serendipity.

2 years later, as I started my graduate studies in Harvard and MIT Media Lab, the influx of dense and novel information made it almost inevitable for me to start sharing these knowledge. And I started writing about the metaverse, XR, hardcore technologies, innovation, self-improvement, cultural shock, art and design, etc. on this platform. My followers grew rapidly, reaching 220k this year, and in total, my writings have been read by over 10 million readers.

My hobby of writing and sharing knowledge has gained me a lot of exposure and opportunities to connect with very established entrepreneurs, artists, designers and innovators. I would attribute a great deal of my success to this habit.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://irispan.net/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irisxpan/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@irisxpan
• Other: https://www.hmwdesign.studio/

Image Credits
Xiaobi Pan