ENTRY 01 · UX / UI
TastePICK Coffee
Tasting without the decision fatigue. A social layer for coffee: discover what others drink, build your own recipe, then let a surprise wheel choose for you in public.
UX / UIInteractive screen
01 — About
Design that moves —
built on craft,
driven by empathy.
From the object to the system, and back.
I began in product design, learning to carry an idea all the way to a market-ready object — packaging awards, several patents, and a working grasp of the whole loop: a user need, a functional answer, a commercial reason to exist.
The MA moved me into the digital. My work now sits where human-computer interaction meets service design, joining physical and digital craft — designing interaction flows for complex service ecosystems, often with AI as a material, and validating ideas fast through prototypes before committing to them.
One thread runs through all of it: making a system legible to the person inside it. London Liming hands authorship back to the people being represented; BatSense asks what space feels like when vision is not the default.
Material Study / 001
“Design isn't making the decision
for someone. It's handing it back.”
Undergraduate projects
02 — BA Projects / Product & Interaction
ENTRY 02 · PRODUCT + EXPERIENCE
Private Warehouse
The shame of a gynaecology exam isn't the exam. A self-service booth inside a community hospital that makes privacy, safety and hygiene hold at the same time.
Women's healthService touchpoints
ENTRY 03 · GAME / UX
Journey to the Pill of Heaven
A game about Aboriginal healing: gathering, meditation, purification. You understand the practice by doing it, not by being told about it.
Game designCultural narrative
ENTRY 04 · VR EXPERIENCE
The End of Vanity
A walk to the end of vanity, in VR. No lecture — three choices and their consequences, until the room shows you what “face” actually costs.
VRSpatial narrative
Postgraduate projects
03 — MA Projects / Communication Design
FIG. 1 / DUMPED LIME, STOKE NEWINGTON
Case 03.1 · MA Major Project · 2025—2026
London Liming:
a display the boys wrote themselves
A dumped shared bike reads as “the neighbourhood is going down”. This project doesn't argue with that. It hands the pen over: young riders author their own portrait, in public. Made with Lime and the youth charity Boyz 2 Men across Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark.
Participatory designLime × Boyz 2 MenPaper accepted
Open the paper ↗
ENTRY 05 · CONDITIONAL DESIGN
Ghost in the Machine
Rules, dice and a two-hour clock. A drawing made by three people who could only respond to each other — individual authorship replaced by attention.
Conditional designStop-motion
ENTRY 06 · VISUAL RESEARCH
Making the Invisible Visible
An atlas of handwritten notes — the signals we leave on walls, desks and classroom surfaces without ever meaning to communicate.
AtlasObservation
ENTRY 07 · SELF-TRACKING
The Quantitative Self
One week of tracking: social media, study, steps, sleep. What the numbers say that the routine quietly hides.
Self-trackingData viz
ENTRY 08 · MORE-THAN-HUMAN
Interactions with Non-humans
Ants navigate by pheromone trails our surfaces keep erasing. A design study of a user who is not human, in a city that was never planned for them.
Non-human usersField research
ENTRY 09 · COUNTER-MAPPING
Dimension Breach
A map for a city that refuses to be flat. Chongqing is navigated by systems built for a plane; this counter-map is drawn for the people who climb it every day.
CartographyCritical design
ENTRY 10 · SPECULATIVE
Sell the Earth™
EARTH+™, 2041. A deployed environmental access system that meters who gets to be outside — six touchpoints, one policy made visible.
SpeculativeSystems
ENTRY 11 · MUSEUM INTERFACE
X-ray the Invisible
A museum interface that scans an object's hidden layers — memory, power, identity — and shows what the wall label leaves out.
Interaction designExhibition
Publication.
Accepted · sole author · tap the card to expand the abstract
04 — Publication
London Liming: An Illustrated Report on a Public Social Display Co-Designed with Lime, Boyz2Men and Boys in London Boroughs
Nan Liu · Sole author · Journal of Technology Innovation and Engineering · Accepted
2026
Open PDF↗
Abstract This article presents London Liming, a proposed co-designed public social display in Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark developed in relation to Lime and the youth charity Boyz 2 Men. It examines how participatory design can challenge stigmatising readings of shared bicycles and young male riders through peer-authored portraits, reversible bicycle wraps, public seating and transparent data notices.
Drawing on semiotics, site-specific and participatory art, and scholarship on mobility justice, the paper describes a design process centred on youth authorship rather than externally imposed representation. The article offers a practice-based design proposition: the workshops and pilot are proposals rather than completed interventions, and their social effects remain to be evaluated.
Keywords participatory design · public display · urban mobility · youth representation · design ethics
Tap to read the abstract, tap again to close
05 — Final Project / MA 2026
BatSense
A speculative multisensory interface inspired by bat echolocation. It translates distance and direction into sound, vibration and real-time visual feedback — and rather than reproducing how a bat perceives, it uses echolocation as a lens to ask why human interfaces remain so visually dominated.
The research moved from “how do bats see?” to “how does an echo become spatial information?” Emission, reflection, return — time, direction, difference — proximity, orientation, environmental cue. An ultrasonic module turns those cues into a wearable and a horizontal app interface, tested against a real prototype rather than a render.
Alongside it, a smaller study in the same question: can a quantity you cannot see be made legible by feel? Framed under Regenerative Systems and more-than-human communication, with Jennifer McHugh.
What if vision were not our default interface with the world?
Side study / resistance
0.0 N
Drag it — let go and it comes back·Arrow keys to adjust, Enter to reset
06 — Curriculum Vitae
CV.
A one-page summary below — open the original PDF for everything
Education
University of SouthamptonMA Communication Design
Tianjin University of Science and TechnologyBA Product Design · GPA 3.71/5.0
Research
London Liming · public social displayLead researcher with Lime and Boyz 2 Men; paper accepted
Modular furniture for small homesPrincipal researcher · BA thesis · advisor Prof. Shijian Cang
Farm support vehicle compartmentKey contributor · design patent CN309384816S
Dongfeng Honda digital-twin 3D configurationMain investigator · Bronze Award, 9th “Internet+” Competition
Experience
Yuxin Advertising Production CenterAdvertising design and production, concept through installation
Longting District Cultural BureauBrand VI system; key visual, icons, DM brochures, print production
Honours
- China Creative Challenges Contest · Second Prize2025.08
- China Creative Packaging Design Competition · Third Prize2024.08
- 9th China International “Internet+” Competition · Bronze Award2023.08
- Henan Province Outstanding Youth Volunteer2022.11
Skills
- ResearchSemi-structured interviews · survey design · usability testing · co-design workshops · literature review
- DesignProduct form · service flows · interface and interaction prototypes · spatial narrative
- Making3D modelling and rendering · CAD drawing · graphic and brand collateral
- LanguageChinese (native) · English (academic writing, workshop facilitation)
Contact
- 13137837608@163.com
- +86 131 3783 7608
- Southampton, UK / Tianjin