Research Interests
Fields: Critical Design; Technology and Society; Cross-disciplinary Knowledge Production
Topics: Democracy and Information; Race and Artificial Intelligence; Shelter and Resilience

Jiayi Young is Professor and Chair of the Department of Design at the University of California, Davis. She works 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 critically explore, through creative practice, the lived experiences, struggles, and complexities that shape human life in the present era. Over the past decade, her work has increasingly converged on democracy and information, race and artificial intelligence, and shelter and resilience. To bring her projects to life, she employs, invents, and develops diverse tools and methodologies that synthesize knowledge across disciplines.

Alongside this work, her practice extends to creating cross-disciplinary platforms through design—a field inherently integrative with a proven history grounded in the ability to rapidly materialize ideas through visualization, prototyping, material exploration, and systems thinking, all while attending to diverse requirements and perspectives. These methods make design a connective practice: one that advances collective thinking and making, while also empowering individuals with new perspectives that strengthen their own disciplinary goals. In developing such frameworks, she positions design not merely as problem-solving but as a catalyst for generating, testing, and sharing knowledge—establishing conditions, processes, and environments where sustained inquiry across disciplines can take root.

As Principal Investigator, she initiates and mobilizes large-scale, multi-year projects that bring together diverse collaborators across institutions and disciplines. Major initiatives include Useful Fictions with École Polytechnique, Paris and the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and The China Shop, a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) award project at the University of California, Davis. Additional special projects include collaborative contributions to the fluid dynamics PhD summer school at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and Behavioral Matter with the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs at the Centre Pompidou. She has also led multiple digital humanities grant projects through the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). Her most recent publication on this subject, Interdisciplinary Arts-Charged Creative Process as a Vehicle for Knowledge Production (Arts et Sciences journal, ISTE OpenScience, London, UK, in press), reflects on the frameworks and methodologies she has developed through these projects.

Young has published and exhibited extensively 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, Russia; UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology; Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne; the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR); and the Asia Theories Network (ATN). She was recently featured in the anthology Experimental Practices in Interdisciplinary Art (Jackson, J., & LaFarge, A., eds., Brill, 2024). She frequently reviews for conferences and journals such as SIGGRAPH Asia, ISEA, the .able Journal, and the Systemic Design Association (RSD), and currently serves on the ISEA International Advisory Committee.