Haochen Zhang

Haochen Zhang is an Industrial Designer who is interested in using design to build a connection with users and viewers. She is passionate about designing emotional sustainable product and interaction design.

Education

BFA Industrial Design at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2017-2021

MA Design Products at Royal College of Art, 2021-2023

Exhibition

London Design Festival, 2022

Haochen Zhang is interested in designing emotional sustainable products which can build connections between user. Her design is focus on people’s emotion health and mental problem.

EmoPet is a project exploring the possibility of improving people’s emotional health. The project is built on Paul Ekman’s psychology model, Atlas of Emotion. It is aim to lead people through an emotion-recording exploration process, which can enable the user to understand their emotions better and raise their emotional awareness.

This Project has two major components: a physical product that enables the user to record their emotion in a more convenient way, and an App that allows the user to unpack their emotion and check their emotion record.

For the designing of a physical product, this project explores how to visualize different emotions through studying different emotion theories, building up models with different shapes and materials, and discussing with psychology Ph.D. student and professor. For designing the App, this project uses the Atlas of Emotion as the cornerstone and explores how to lead user go through the exploration of the trigger, experience, and response of their emotion.

This Project aims to develop a new way to help people pay more attention to their emotions, understand their feeling more clearly and improve their emotional health.