Zhenying Cui

About

Hi there, my name is Zhenying Cui, and I am a service designer with an industrial design and UX design background. Throughout the year, I've worked with Catch22 and partners, carrying out collaborative research & reveal insights that may help form and inform the existing services and interventions developed for supporting people on probation(London), around issues of finance, benefit and debt. Our team received highly positive feedback from both direct users and stakeholders for our design of a board game workshop. Despite making subtle yet impactful design modifications, we ensured the intervention remained actionable, low-cost and easy to iterate and customized.

Now my team(Ziyu Fang and Shuai Du) and I are working on a self-directed brief as our final project called 'Sparkbot', which aims to help people in creative fields better capture and preserve their invaluable inspiration.

My experience:

  • Nov 2022 - Feb 2023 Probation service project collaborated with Catch22 (SD challenge lab brief project)
  • Mar- Nov 2022 UX intern at LinkedIn, Beijing
  • 2017-2022 Majored in Industrial Design at Donghua University, Shanghai


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Degree Details

Statement

I have always been captivated by technology and marvellously designed innovative products & services. However, during my bachelor's studies in industrial design, with a primary focus on designing for commercial purposes, I realized that a single product alone could not create a truly delightful experience for people. It serves as just one touchpoint within a larger context. This realization led me to delve into the expansive realm of service design, where I aim to understand and enhance systems.

Sparkbot

We conducted 16 interviews with design/art students from different backgrounds, practitioners in the creative industry and even developers without a design background.
We mapped different behaviour based on the journey from people noticing the inspiration strikes, capturing, and categorizing to looking back to them. It helped us find an interesting pattern among certain people and gained insights, then finally we decided on our target group.
Based on these insights, we came up with a HMW: How might we create a memory-enhancing inspiration-capture service for less-organised designers, to help them ease the stress of organising by utilising AI while they can still quickly capture their thoughts in a 'messy' way?

Mission statement

Inspiration is important, it’s a catalyst for innovation, and it has the power to elevate us beyond our immediate and self-centred concerns, allowing us to tap into something more profound and transformative.

People working in creative fields, already have lots of inspiration, but the sorting problem stops them from noting down and reflecting on those thoughts.

The repetitive organizing work increases the pressure to take notes freely and quickly, which in turn hinders the ability to maintain the habit of building an inspirational archive. However, it's hard for less-organised people to follow certain methods or rules to structure their thoughts in the long term.

Therefore our mission is not to teach them how to be 'organised', instead, our early concepts encourage our targeted users to freely write anything in the chat bubble, regardless of the folder name, title, or tags...Just freely write down anything that inspires them, and our LLM integrated service will do the organising work automatically.

Probation service x Catch22

Re-offending remains a significant social concern, beyond the cost to taxpayers, it permeates fear & anxiety across neighbourhoods and communities. We worked with Catch22 and partners, carrying out collaborative research & reveal insights that may help form and inform the existing services and interventions developed for supporting people on probation(London), around issues of finance, benefit and debt.

Problem Definition

While the Catch22 team genuinely offers support for people on probation (POPs) around financial, debt and benefit issues, from the perspective of the POPs themselves, this support only means supervision and mandatory meetings. Also, the limited literacy, lack of awareness, and communication gap...all of these factors combined lead to POPs' non-engagement in their service.

Thus, we need to find a way to bridge the gap, and better deliver the knowledge. After researching the educational approaches the caseworker used in the current service, which varied based on the caseworker's own experience and expertise, we came up with an initial idea: what if we teach POPs through games?