Why has he repeatedly won international awards?, The world design stage resounds with the voice of China, the United States | International | Stage
A young designer from Fujian province has made a name for himself in the United States across the ocean with a series of international design awards. He is Wang Weijie, an American dual master's interactive designer.
In May of this year, Wang Weijie won the German IF Design Award in one fell swoop. His work "Pia Speech Interaction Project at Pittsburgh International Airport" competed with products from various multinational companies such as Google, Apple, and IBM on the same stage. He stood out among 10544 entries from 56 countries and was invited to attend the 70th IF Design Night in Germany in May of this year.
Achievement is not achieved overnight. Previously, he had won numerous international awards such as the HCII International Human Computer Interaction Forum Gold Award, the Muse Muse Design Competition Platinum Award in the United States, the highest award in the Core77 in the United States, the IxDA Interaction Design Award, and the Indigo Design Gold Award in the Netherlands. His design works span across multiple countries, including China, the United States, France, Switzerland, Poland, etc. His works can be seen at San Francisco Design Week, Red Dot Design Museum, Taipei Local Art Museum, and Asian Design Exhibition.
Wang Weijie and his design team.
[Interaction You may ask, what is interaction design? Wang Weijie gave his interpretation: interaction design is to use technology as a tool to explore the best path of interaction between people, people and machines, and people and the Internet. In short, interaction design is to use scientific and technological means to solve the problems people encounter in their daily behavior. For example, after we design a computer, the next problem we need to consider is how to enable people to effectively control the computer? To this end, we have designed a keyboard to input instructions, a mouse to control the interface, a voice interaction system such as siri to talk with computers, and an eye tracking system to allow people to control the interface only through eye movements. "This is human-computer interaction."
So, in Wang Weijie's eyes, what should the current interaction design look like? "Interaction design is not only an art, but also a science that strives to solve human problems and simplify complex things. I firmly believe that the high initiative of interaction design can be adjusted rapidly according to the changes of people's needs and the growth of problems, so that it can better adapt to people's needs and help them solve problems to a greater extent." In practice, Wang Weijie always adheres to the concept of making design welfare touch every group of people, and strives to realize the "versatility" and "accessibility" of design, making design the most natural existence in life.
Wang Weijie was invited by Yokohama City East High School in Japan to organize various design activities for students.
The source of inspiration for design, for Wang Weijie, often comes from subtle issues in life.
On a journey back from Pittsburgh International Airport in the United States, he discovered common problems that passengers often encounter, such as picking up the wrong luggage, international passengers having difficulty speaking, and so on. These seemingly minor issues sparked his thinking and prompted him to proactively contact the airport, participate in and lead a renovation plan aimed at these issues.
When the design team led by Wang Weijie was designing, they did not choose to create a new app, but decided to make full use of existing resources. Their starting point is to create a user-friendly, hands-free, and accessible design for all audiences. Therefore, they turned their attention to the existing self-service check-in counters at Pittsburgh Airport.
Pia Pittsburgh International Airport's voice design interaction project.
Behind this decision is their thoughtful consideration of inclusive design and user safety. Creating a new app may seem simple, but it can actually bring many problems. For example, users may have doubts about downloading new or unfamiliar apps and worry about their data security. More importantly, for groups such as the elderly who are not good at using smartphones, new apps may become a difficult barrier to overcome.
Therefore, they chose self-service check-in counters as the entry point and designed a voice assistant using artificial intelligence technology. This assistant is not only convenient for passengers to use when carrying luggage, but also caters to users from different languages and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, this voice assistant can provide multiple functions including indicating the path, predicting the time, and recommending services according to the needs of passengers, greatly enhancing the experience of passengers at Pittsburgh Airport.
[Design Philosophy: Let Design Touch Every Crowd]
While utilizing technology for interactive design, Wang Weijie also reflects on existing designs. He turned his gaze to those marginalized by the technological process and attempted to help them transition from "digital refugees" to "digital immigrants" through interactive design.
In China, some elderly people are isolated from the information age because they cannot use smartphones, and they are like "digital refugees" who have not enjoyed the convenience brought by technology.
Wang Weijie's design team noticed this issue and found that elderly people in China rely heavily on the perpetual calendar as a daily action guide. So, the team took this as a starting point and designed an interactive perpetual calendar that links to authoritative information every day, such as how to wash hands correctly, how to wear masks correctly, and even how to purchase medicine online. This perpetual calendar is implanted with an NFC chip, which allows for immediate access to relevant information when the phone is close, greatly reducing the learning barrier for elderly people using smartphones and helping them adapt to a more digital life in the post pandemic era. This design has been selected as an exhibit at the 2020 Asian Society Design Exhibition and has been exhibited in various places such as the Xiamen Red Dot Design Museum.
A smart interactive calendar designed specifically for the elderly in China.
In addition to focusing on the elderly population, Wang Weijie also demonstrated a people-oriented design philosophy when dealing with special groups - children with autism. In 2015, he volunteered at the An'an Autism Children's Center in Fuzhou and found that this group faced many problems in daily life, especially difficulties for parents in observing, recording children's behavior, and communicating with doctors. The existence of these issues became the starting point for Wang Weijie and his team's innovative design.
To solve this problem, he and his team designed CareCam, a wearable smart camera that helps parents better record the behavior of children with autism. When a child has negative behavior, CareCam can automatically capture and record these behaviors, and upload them to the parents' mobile app. Then, the system will analyze the child's behavior based on natural language processing and directly transmit this behavior data to doctors to help them understand the condition and provide accurate treatment recommendations. In this way, CareCam greatly solves the problems of parents being unable to manually record their children's daily behaviors, frequently taking them to the hospital, and not remembering how to tell the doctor about the details of their condition, greatly improving the treatment efficiency and quality of life of children with autism.
