Research Interests: Critical Design Technology, Cross-disciplinary Knowledge Production,  Democracy and Information, Race and Artificial intelligence, and Shelter and Resilience.

Jiayi Young is an artist and designer working at the intersection of art, design, science, and engineering. She leverages data and digital media to create interfaces, large-scale installations, and temporary and permanent public art that are data-driven or informed by data findings. Her inquiries are critical and humanistic in nature, often addressing rapid technological advancements that challenge us to rethink the contemporary human condition and reexamine the experiences, challenges, and realities that define human existence in the modern era. Over the past decade, her work has increasingly converged on democracy and information, race and artificial intelligence, and shelter and resilience. To bring these projects to life, she employs, invents, and develops diverse tools and methodologies that synthesize knowledge across disciplines.

She has also been dedicated to designing cross-disciplinary apparatuses and platforms that contribute to an epistemological framework for bringing together artists, designers, scientists, and technologists across diverse geographies and perspectives. These efforts advance shared inquiries into pressing societal concerns, generating not only new artistic forms and expressions but also scientific, technological innovations, and public-engaged scholarship. Major multi-year initiatives include Useful Fictions (with École Polytechnique, Paris); I Feel the Rain of Another Planet at Churchill College, University of Cambridge; Behavioral Matter with École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs at the Centre Pompidou; multiple grant projects through the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI); and The China Shop, a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) award project at the University of California, Davis. Her most recent publication on this subject is titled “Interdisciplinary Arts-Charged Creative Process as a Vehicle for Knowledge Production” (The Arts and Sciences journal, ISTE OpenScience, London, UK, in press).

Young has published and exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Ars Electronica; the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA); the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA); the Hall of Science, New York; the United Nations Fourth Conference on Women, Beijing; the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology, and Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne. She currently serves on the ISEA International Advisory Committee and as an external reviewer for SIGGRAPH Asia, ISEA, the .able Journal, and the Systemic Design Association (RSD).