Ethan Sijun Huang（黄思骏）

My design practice understands design as a way of constructing relational conditions. For me, design is not aimed at functional optimization or problem-solving, but rather at enabling, maintaining, or perceiving certain relationships through the setting of systems, media, and rules. Design here is not an outcome, but a means of organizing reality.

My design practice focuses on how humans establish relationships with "non-human things" through media—including nature, machines, memories, absent individuals, and those existences that cannot be fully perceived or verified. Instead of viewing media as tools serving humanity, I am more interested in whether the human position shifts when media are endowed with the capacity for perception, response, and continuous presence. Therefore, my work often starts from a de-centered human perspective, using design to create a new relational and power structure where humans are no longer the sole subjects, but become part of the system.

In my practice, media is a design material to be manipulated, not an object of discussion. Through interfaces, installations, narrative structures, and spatial arrangements, I design how media intervenes in relationships—determining who can perceive, when responses occur, and what information is obscured. These decisions constitute the design itself, not merely formal choices.

My projects often take liminal states as design objects, such as the ambiguous zone between presence and absence, the points of pause in front of memorial installations, and the moments of narrative branching. These are not passively presented scenes, but carefully designed processes and experiential nodes. By orchestrating time, paths, and attention, I treat relationships as a process that can be designed but not fully controlled.

As a whole, my design practice can be understood as a continuous relational experiment: it explores, through objects, images, and systems, how humans coexist with non-human subjects, invisible things, and uncertain futures in a highly technological environment. I view design as a mediating practice capable of carrying emotional and spiritual tension, rather than simply functional production. By constructing prototypes that lie between reality and speculation, function and symbolism, I hope to provide an alternative way of viewing and engaging with contemporary technological culture.

Skills

Figma, AI, PS, PR, Claude Code, AE, P5.js, UE5, TouchDesigner, Maya, Unity, Blender, Arduino, Microsoft Office, Javascript, html, css, Java, C#