By Abbie Wilson
Visitors view Zeya Chen's Fish in the Night Mist at 'The Night' exhibition during Milano Design Week 2026 at La Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan. Photo courtesy of Zeya Chen.
Zeya Chen is a Chicago-based design researcher and practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of complex information systems and human experience. Spanning AI-powered applications, behavioral design, data governance, and human-centered privacy, her practice focuses on how emerging technologies can be made more understandable, equitable, and safer for the people who rely on them. Chen brings a perspective that bridges behavioral insight with technical realities and lands in actual practice, an approach that has earned sustained recognition within the international design and art communities.
Chen's work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris as part of Art Shopping, the Salon International d'Art Contemporain; the Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin during the Art Berlin Biennial; the Creative Asia Art Center in Melbourne for the Multicultural Art Festival; and the Casa Abitata in Florence for the Florence Annual International Art Exhibition, among others. Three current exhibitions in Germany, the United States, and Italy represent the most recent chapter of this ongoing activity.
At the Red Dot Design Museum Essen, Chen's Campus AutoShuttle is included in "
World's Best Communication Design 2025," a major exhibition of more than 800 awarded brand and communication design projects from 39 countries, on view through May 31, 2026 at the museum's UNESCO World Heritage Site venue at Zollverein. The Campus AutoShuttle, which Chen led and which received the 2025 Red Dot Award in the Interface & User Experience category, is a human-machine interface and UX system for autonomous campus mobility. Built on a proprietary multi-modal radar system and live operational datasets, the interface makes the decision-making process of self-driving vehicles transparent and legible to passengers through real-time safety visualization, environmental perception displays, and data-driven personalization. Rather than treating autonomous technology as a sealed system, the project opens it up, giving riders a clear, continuous reading of how the vehicle perceives and responds to its surroundings. The Campus AutoShuttle is one of several works Chen has exhibited that address human trust in automated mobility systems.
In Chicago, two of Chen's works are featured in "ID @ 85: 85 Years of Making the Future," a long-term exhibition organized by the Design Museum of Chicago in partnership with the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. The exhibition, which opened in October 2022 and remains on view, uses 85 key projects to trace the institute's pioneering role in design practice from its founding as The New Bauhaus by Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy in 1937 to the present day. Among the works selected is Chen's Digital Ghost, an interactive VR installation that uses an AR filter generated by facial recognition and AI data collection to probe the ethics of human-machine relationships. The filter produces what resembles a mosaic mask composed of photographs drawn from Chen's personal album, arranged according to color and light values mapped onto the viewer's face. Each person who encounters the work generates a unique model, visualizing the mathematical logic behind AI facial recognition in an immediately visceral, personal form. Operating across four themes of AI development logic, data and identity, data cloning technology, and AI-based society, Digital Ghost does not merely illustrate how facial recognition works; it implicates the viewer in its process, turning them into both subject and output. The work is the ONLY piece by a solo practitioner in the exhibition's fourth section, "New Era," where it appears alongside group-produced projects.
Most recently, Chen presented two works at
Milano Design Week 2026, widely recognized as the largest and most influential annual design event in the world. The 2026 edition drew over 500,000 visitors to the city, with more than 1,300 events activating venues across Milan's design districts alongside the 64th Salone del Mobile, which welcomed over 316,000 trade visitors from 167 countries at Rho Fiera Milano. Chen's works were exhibited within "The Night," a group exhibition held at Le Cisterne in La Fabbrica del Vapore (April 21-25, 2026). Among them is Fish in the Night Mist, a series of four watercolor and pastel illustrations in which fish drift through dim interiors and nocturnal landscapes. While the medium is analog, the concerns are continuous with Chen's broader practice. The fish serve as carriers of memory and interior experience, figures navigating environments they cannot fully see or control, much like users moving through opaque digital systems. Through hazy layers and softened night scenes, the series explores how individuals process uncertainty, hold onto fading information, and search for orientation within environments shaped by forces larger than themselves. The work extends Chen's ongoing investigation into the emotional dimensions of human-system relationships, here transposed from the technological to the poetic.
These recent exhibitions reflect the range and consistency of Chen's practice, moving between autonomous vehicle interfaces, interactive AI installations, and hand-rendered illustration while remaining grounded in questions of how people experience and navigate complex socio-technical systems. Beyond her work as an art and design practitioner, Chen is also an active design researcher. She holds an M.Des from the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Industrial Design from Wuhan University, China, and is currently conducting doctoral research at the Institute of Design, where her work sits at the frontier of design and human-computer interaction. Her research has been published at peer-reviewed venues including ACM CHI, DIS, CCS, the Design Research Society, HCII, and She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, and she serves as a program committee member and reviewer for these SigCHI series international conferences and journals. She sits on the Organizing Committee of the Chongqing Engineers Association's Industrial Design Committee in China and is a Professional Member of The Design Society community. Her design and art practice has earned over 30 international awards, including multiple iF Design Awards, a Red Dot Award, Core77, Fast Company World-Changing Innovations, and Muse Design Awards.
