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

Hi Xinyu, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I dreamed of becoming an interior designer when I was in high school. I read a lot of interior design magazines and the beautiful houses and furniture provoked me to explore interior design and what it means to people’s lives. I think at that time it was a desire for beautiful things. This natural passion led me to interior design. I began to intentionally look at the layout of interiors, the materials, and the combination of furnishings. After years of professional interior design courses, I learned more about design ideas and details from the creator’s point of view. I discovered the connection between life and space. I realized how interior design affects people’s lives and how creators use design to bring joy to our lives. Now, I firmly believe that interior design is the path to my dreams. I look forward to bringing more aesthetics and happiness to life.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hello, I am Xinyu Zhang, an interior designer. I am currently focusing on multi-family design, and later hope to get more involved in hospitality design. After receiving my MFA degree in Interior Design from SCAD, I decided to try to work in the U.S. I knew it would be a journey full of unknowns and challenges. I love to challenge myself and explore the unknown, which makes my life full of surprises. Creative work gives me the opportunity to take on different challenges, which is one of the reasons why I love interior design. When I am dealing with different clients and different spaces, I get to know the clients and the spaces step by step in every conversation and design review. Every time I get a new project, I am thrilled by the process of designing the entire space from scratch and conceptualizing all the details. I also like to explore the client’s characteristics or regional cultural features in a project to make it more unique.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

Perhaps because interior design has a strong connection to life, most of the non-creatives around me understand my passion and journey for becoming an interior designer. But it is important for clients to understand our design journey as well as our project history. Clients have a variety of backgrounds other than interior design. One of the specialties of interior designers is spatial imagination. When I discuss a design with a colleague, we are able to quickly create a 3D space in our heads, but this can be difficult for non-creatives to understand. So we need to articulate the details of our design and build the client’s understanding of our design step by step. Mine is to explain the whole design development process and the logic between each step, so that the client can understand our design decisions.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

People spend most of their time indoors, and interior spaces are a presence in life that cannot be ignored. I believe that the job of an interior designer is to create amazing experiences for clients through our professional abilities. I want to see people feel the positive difference that design makes in their lives. Creating quality spaces for people is one of the things that drives me as a designer. It is especially satisfying to imagine people using, living and enjoying the spaces I design.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://zhangxinyu9510.wixsite.com/website
• Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/xinyu-zhang-id

Image Credits
photographer: Jiajie Liu Rendering: Xinyu Zhang