From Red Dot to strategy: how Yuanqing redefines the role of design in business

When Yuanqing received the Red Dot Award, many assumed it marked the high point of a promising design career. But for her, the recognition was something different: a quiet confirmation that design — when anchored in empathy and guided by careful observation — could travel far beyond studios and sketches, influencing decisions, systems, and entire industries.

In many ways, the award did not simply acknowledge a single project. It illuminated a long-standing pattern in her life: an instinct to cross boundaries, to move between worlds that rarely touch, and to carry the sensibility of a designer into spaces unaccustomed to its presence.

Yuanqing began her journey in art and industrial design studios, where materials spoke and details mattered. Her early years were spent observing how people move, touch, hesitate, or rush — how emotion surfaces not only in expression but in gesture, silence, and micro-behavior. While her peers gravitated toward form- making, she was fascinated by something more elusive: the psychological undercurrents embedded in everyday life.

This sensitivity became the backbone of her work. Even as her career expanded into management consulting and AI-driven strategy, she never left behind the designerʼs way of seeing the world — an attention to nuance, a respect for human complexity, and a belief that design is ultimately about meaning, not decoration.

Her path has been unconventional, but what makes it striking is not the switch from design to business. It is the continuity she carries — the way she uses design thinking as a lens to understand systems, decisions, and human truths that data alone cannot reveal.

The earliest seeds of this approach were planted in her third year of art school. As AI began its ascent into pop culture and panic, Yuanqing resisted the narrative of replacement. Instead, she asked a different question:

Her research focused on a subtle yet universal problem: the emotional disconnection many young people feel from nature while living in dense cities. She observed how modern life dulls our senses, narrows our awareness, and erodes moments of grounding.

Her response was an AI-powered AR companion that guided users through immersive nature experiences — each gesture and animation crafted to feel organic, alive, and emotionally attuned. She developed the concept of Emotional AI Motion: using micro-gestures, pauses, and subtle rhythms to imbue AI with a sense of presence rather than machinery.

It was a project that quietly foreshadowed her future: technology not as efficiency tool, but as emotional medium.

When Yuanqing later joined Bain & Company, she brought this human-centric intuition into high-stakes strategic settings. In boardrooms where decisions were driven by spreadsheets and growth curves, she introduced a different mode of understanding — one grounded in user empathy, behavioral insight, and narrative logic.

Her work on the “Create Real Magicˮ global generative-AI campaign for Coca- Cola was emblematic of this approach. The challenge was to reinvent how a 130- year-old brand speaks to Gen Z. Yuanqing helped design an interactive platform that merged DALLE-E and GPT, allowing users across 43 countries to remix Coca-Cola imagery into personalized AI-generated artwork. The campaign was showcased at OpenAI Dev Day and went viral for its playfulness and accessibility.

The significance was not just in the technology, but in the feeling it evoked: creativity as a shared experience, not a solitary act.

In another project, she led the design of a human-in-the-loop AI system for a global medical equipment company. After spending hours listening to live support calls, she uncovered emotional stress and operational friction that dashboards failed to show. Her insights shaped a workflow that improved patient outcomes and agent well-being simultaneously — revealing the depth of empathy she brings to each problem.

Across these engagements, her signature strength emerged clearly:

transforming abstract business problems into deeply human narratives that guide strategic decisions.

Even before consulting, her time at SHEIN and eBay built her reputation for navigating systems with a designerʼs eye. She redesigned navigation flows for emerging global markets, refined A/B testing frameworks, and studied how supply chains influence user behavior.

Her Red Dot–winning project emerged from research in Chinaʼs manufacturing ecosystem, where she investigated the constraints faced by small and medium factory owners in entering cross-border e-commerce. Her findings connected ground-level realities — logistical barriers, emotional stress, technological gaps — to global commercial patterns.

This ability to hold the micro and macro in the same frame became a signature of her work:

she moves fluidly from the intimacy of user emotion to the scale of international systems.

Today, Yuanqing brings her hybrid thinking to TikTok Shopʼs U.S. strategy team, a space where content, culture, and commerce collide. Her work blends qualitative research, merchant insights, data analysis, and ecosystem design.

She approaches strategy the same way she approaches design:

as a process of uncovering human truths and structuring environments around them.

Rather than treating design and strategy as separate disciplines, she treats them as two ways of understanding the same question:

In a fast-moving commerce ecosystem, her ability to interpret user behavior, identify emotional friction points, and translate qualitative insight into structured strategic decisions has become essential.

Across every chapter of her career, one throughline remains unmistakable:

To her, design is not a discipline defined by mediums or artifacts — it is a worldview. One that shapes systems, influences strategy, and guides how AI enters human life.

As the world accelerates toward an increasingly automated era, her work poses a quiet challenge:

innovation must be human, or it is not innovation at all.

In the convergence of design, business, and AI, Yuanqing stands as a reminder that the most powerful technologies are those that bring us back to ourselves.

This article was written in cooperation with Tom White