Introduction

Last updated March 2026

My name is Jenny Liu Zhang and I’m an American digital designer. I focus on digital experiences like consumer software and online games, but I also have experience in design strategy and systems design. I’m a bit unconventional in my process and explore my design career through two interdependent tracks: practice and theory.

As a digital practitioner, I build online experiences using agile development processes and participatory design principles. I work both alone and in teams to consider a product’s users, affordances, and the socio-ecological systems they create. As a result, my practice also touches artmaking, the social sciences, and the leadership work of founding projects from nebulous origins. I don’t claim to be an interaction designer or software technologist in any absolute sense; my practice is in service of an outcome, and I am happy to wear multiple hats in the process.

Since the beginning of my career, I’ve also found the humanities, specifically in the form of prose and philosophical literature, crucial to my design ethos. I crave articulating the criteria and implications of my work. I feel deeply that we practice the world we want to live in, even in the subtlest interactions. Because I believe we each bear some responsibility to the human project, I want to be curious, soulful, and wholehearted in what my design decisions value.

Therefore, I reflect on research and theory in the philosophy of technology, media studies, and futures studies to develop my understanding of the role of the digital experiences on human life. I’ve done this in university contexts through my postgraduate training and academic conferences, as well as independently through creative practices like Plot Twisters. In short, I seek out critical frameworks, fiction, and nonfiction to shade in my understanding of shared reality; I also construct my own ontologies through methods like narrative research and media archaeology. These form the knowledge foundation from which I build, and the rubrics of ethics and taste against which I vet my products and the products of others. Those products reveal in turn where my theories are accurate, wrong, or missing information, which feeds back into my theoretical sharpening once again.

Both my practice and theory work are interdisciplinary by necessity, and I’m wary of dogmatic approaches to creativity. I’m also crucially rooted in the United States of America, as a woman of East Asian descent—I would be an entirely different person without these backgrounds. For all that I owe these identities, both good and bad, I represent their intersectionality in my work. Each project is an offering from these perspectives, aiming to grow their wisdom.

Mostly, I want to know what it means to create things by design, and how our designed things, in turn, transform us. In the din of this process, I ask cautiously, with the hope that we have the time: how might we create a world worth living in for generations to come?

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