By Jon Stojan

New York-based designer Hanyong Kyrie Yang works at the intersection of interaction design, AI, and civic life — tracing the small frictions that accumulate into how people experience the world around them.

Her entry into design came through fashion, a discipline she credits with sharpening her attention to the body, perception, and emotional nuance. That sensitivity has since migrated into product and interaction design, where she applies it at a different scale — reshaping the digital systems people move through daily without noticing.

Designing for a City That Doesn’t Agree

Her most visible work to date is the redesign of the NYCxDESIGN platform, the official digital home of New York Design Week. Taking on the project shortly before graduating from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Yang led an overhaul of both the festival app and website — platforms that together serve more than 500,000 visitors each year. However, the complexity of the project was not only technical. It lay in the nature of the audience itself. NYCxDESIGN brings together institutions, independent studios, industry professionals, and the general public — groups that differ not only in what they look for, but in how they navigate, interpret, and value design.

Yang approached the platform as a space of negotiation. The redesign restructured the information architecture and introduced a new interface system that could hold these differences without forcing them into uniformity, resulting in a 46% increase in key action completion. “The challenge was not to simplify the audience,” she says, “but to create a system where difference can still feel coherent. When people across ages 10 to 100 and diverse cultures come together in New York, the goal is to foster trust, inclusivity, and connection.”

Making Sense of Complexity Through AI

Alongside this work, award-winning project Hive AI explores a more speculative dimension of her practice. Developed as a non-linear thinking tool, it reflects her perspective on artificial intelligence as a system shaped by the complexity of human cognition. Drawing from both neural processes and the generative logic of large language models, Hive AI positions AI as an intuitive partner in thinking. Designed for both B2B and B2C contexts, the project offers a flexible framework for organizing thought, creativity, and decision-making. It has received multiple international design awards, including the Red Dot Product Award, Indigo Award (Gold), and A’ Design Award (Silver).

Extending Care Across Media and Spaces

Alongside her professional work, Yang has been deliberately building a practice around public engagement as she sees the city itself as a site of care and shared responsibility, and the projects she takes on reflect that view. Her research extends this inquiry into physical space - in collaboration with Professor Margaret Jack ph.D. at NYU Tandon, she has been studying community gardens as sites of social infrastructure, examining how they sustain human connection within increasingly technologized urban environments. The research was published in the proceedings of ACM 2025 under the title Ethereal Composting.

Yang has also contributed to public art in Brooklyn, working with Professor and Artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo and fellow NYU ITP artists on The Noctarium, a projection work presented by the DUMBO Business Improvement District. The piece, part of a larger series, explores how encounters with shared installations can surface personal memory, relationship, and narrative.

Designing as an Ethics of Attention

Across each of these contexts, Yang returns to a consistent question: how small shifts within systems change what people can feel and understand. For her, design is less a discipline than a posture - one that treats aesthetics, experience, and structure not as separate concerns, but as different registers of the same act of care.