Yizhen Li
1. Please give us a brief bio of yourself and your design background.
I’m Yizhen Li, an eco‑centric new‑media artist and UX designer currently based between Hawaiʻi and San Francisco. After training in human-centred design, I spent five years creating data‑driven installations and digital products that translate environmental signals into immersive experiences. My practice bridges art, science, and community activism.
2. What made you become/why did you choose to become a designer/artist?
Spreadsheets and static infographics don’t shift how people relate to the planet. I wanted to create experiences where the ocean responds, a volcano sends vibrations through a subwoofer, and human bodies become part of an ecosystem's flow. Design gives me the tools to make those encounters.
3. Tell us more about your agency/company, job profile, and what you do.
I founded The Liminal Collective, a studio‑agency dedicated to “infrastructures of reciprocity.” I lead eco‑ethnography, creative coding, and installation direction, partnering with scientists and local stewards to transform field data, community stories, and natural phenomena into shared practises - be that an app, an interactive dinner, or a room that breathes.
4. What does “design” mean to you?
Design is choreography: arranging relationships (human ↔ non‑human, digital ↔ material) so that responsibility and wonder circulate.
5. What’s your favourite kind of design and why?
Relational environments - projects that act more like ecosystems than artefacts. They evolve, listen, and occasionally misbehave; that unpredictability keeps audiences present.
6. To you, what makes a “good” design?
It changes behaviour without demanding obedience, invites care without prescribing guilt, and leaves its host ecosystem healthier than before.
7. How did you come up with the idea for your award-winning design?
While diving a bleaching reef in Kona, Hawaii, I realised every GoPro clip could be a conservation datapoint - if the system valued it. WaveLens was conceived as underwater infrastructure: nudging divers to document, verifying that input in situ, and feeding it back into collective decision‑making.
8. What was your main source of inspiration for this design?
Interspecies communication attempts from whale songs to fungal mycelia networks. They remind me that information is always embodied, never just visual.
9. Do you think your country and its cultural heritage has an impact on your design process?
Chinese cosmology frames nature and humanity as one breathing organism. That outlook guides me to design feedback loops, not commodities.
10. Congratulations! As the winner of the London Design Awards, what does it mean to you and your company and team to receive this award distinction?
It signals that regenerative experiences can stand toe‑to‑toe with consumer tech, giving us traction to fund bigger, slower, place‑based projects.
11. Can you explain a bit about the winning work you entered into the London Design Awards, and why you chose to enter this project?
WaveLens turns underwater adventures into live reef stewardship: AI verifies bleaching severity, geotags species, and shares actionable insights with NGOs and dive communities. We entered it to show that environmental tech can feel like play and produce rigorous science.
12. What were the main challenges you faced during the design process, and how did you overcome them?
One of the challenges was that saltwater kills electronics and bandwidth. So we built offline edge‑processing on low‑power chips, designed glove‑friendly interfaces, and co‑tested with local dive crews until the system felt like second nature underwater.
13. How do you think winning this award will impact your future as a designer?
It accelerates collaborations with coral‑lab partners and helps position eco‑new‑media as a legitimate research modality, not just an art genre.
14. What are your top three (3) favorite things about the design industry?
1. Boundary‑crashing collaborations (biologists sketching UI flows!).
2. Growing literacy in material circularity.
3. The shift from audience consumption to audience co‑creation.
15. What sets your design apart from others in the same category?
The installation or app is never the endpoint; it’s the first draft of a relationship that participants continue in their own habitats.
16. Where do you see the evolution of design industry going over the next 5-10 years?
From “user experience” toward “ecosystem experience”: products will be judged by how they negotiate energy, attention, and carbon across entire lifecycles.
17. What advice do you have for aspiring designers who want to create award-winning designs?
Prototype in the field. Let humidity warp your plywood and sea spray short your circuits; the fixes you invent will be your signature.
18. What resources would you recommend to someone who wants to improve their skills in the design industry?
There are 3 resources I would recommend:
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (ethics of reciprocity).
• TOPLAP live‑coding community (embodied computation).
• Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network open datasets (for anyone wanting real‑world stakes).
19. Tell us something you have never told anyone else.
I keep a “failed sensor graveyard” and consult it before every new project, it’s my memento mori for techno‑solutionism.
20. Who has inspired you in your life and why?
Composer Annea Lockwood; her river sound maps prove that listening can be cartography and activism in one gesture.
21. What is your key to success? Any parting words of wisdom?
Design like a watershed: accept everything that flows into you, filter gently, release cleaner water downstream.
