Interview with Yitong Du

I have always been fascinated by the fact that design quietly influences everyday life. A road, a park, a chair, a digital interface, or even a small construction detail can change how people move, behave, communicate, and feel.

Growing up, I was exposed to engineering and the built environment through my father, who worked as a civil engineer. That gave me an early awareness that the environments around us are not accidental—they are planned, calculated, constructed, and maintained by people.

What eventually drew me toward design was the opportunity to combine technical problem-solving with human experience. I enjoy taking something complicated—whether it is a site, a public process, a construction problem, or an AI workflow—and making it understandable and usable.

The most satisfying moment is when the design disappears into the experience. People may not recognize every decision behind it, but they can move through it naturally and benefit from it. That is what continues to motivate me.

I design human-centered systems across both physical and digital environments.

My landscape work has included civic parks, recreation areas, transportation projects, campuses, residential developments, and other public environments. My digital work has included enterprise products, AI-assisted workflows, productivity tools, and intelligent interfaces.

Increasingly, I am interested in projects that sit between these disciplines. I do not think the future of design will remain neatly separated into landscape, architecture, interaction design, product design, and technology. Physical spaces are becoming more interactive, digital products are becoming more spatial and contextual, and AI is changing how people access information and make decisions.

I would like to design more experiences where place, technology, information, and human behavior are considered as one system. For me, the medium is secondary. What matters is whether the design creates a meaningful relationship between people and the world around them.

A good designer can create a compelling solution. A great designer understands why that solution should exist, how it will work in reality, and what happens after it leaves the designer’s hands.

Great design requires judgment. It means knowing when to explore and when to simplify, when to defend an idea and when to change it, and how to balance ambition with constraints.

My landscape architecture experience made this very tangible. A concept drawing may look beautiful, but eventually it has to become grading, dimensions, materials, planting, drainage, details, specifications, coordination, and construction. A few millimeters on a drawing can become a very real problem in the field.

Digital product design has reinforced the same lesson. A polished interface means very little if users cannot understand it or if the underlying workflow fails.

For me, the difference is therefore not simply creativity. It is the ability to carry an idea from intention to execution without losing its purpose.

I evaluate design through several layers.

First, it must solve the right problem. A beautifully executed answer to the wrong question is still poor design.

Second, it should be understandable. People should not need to fight the design in order to use it.

Third, it should respond intelligently to context—social, environmental, cultural, technical, and economic.

Fourth, it needs enough technical resolution to survive implementation. This is especially important in landscape architecture, where materials weather, plants grow, water moves, and construction tolerances are real.

Finally, I look for longevity. A strong design should continue to make sense after the novelty disappears.

The best designs often feel almost obvious once they exist. Their simplicity can hide an enormous amount of analysis, iteration, coordination, and craft. I think that is one of the highest achievements in design: making complexity feel natural.

One project that is particularly meaningful to me is Kherson Park in Kent, Washington.

It is a relatively small civic park, but the design had an unusually ambitious purpose. The project transforms local aerospace history into an environment for play, learning, and community interaction. Space-themed elements—including a lunar lander, lunar rover, astronaut, mission control components, and digital augmented-reality experiences—turn the park into an informal STEM learning environment.

I worked on the project from the concept stage through construction documentation and construction support. During schematic design, I developed alternatives, perspectives, and spatial studies. Later, I was responsible for major portions of the 60%, 90%, and 100% construction document sets, including existing conditions, layout, sections, details, planting, and site furnishing information. I also participated in site visits during construction.

What makes the project important to me is not simply its visual character. It demonstrates how storytelling, education, play, public space, technology, and technical detailing can become one coherent experience.

The project also reinforced something fundamental in my practice: design is not complete when the concept is approved. The idea must survive documentation, coordination, fabrication, construction, and ultimately everyday use. Seeing children interact with a space that once existed only as lines and images on my screen was deeply satisfying.

I often describe my work this way: I design systems for people—sometimes the interface is a screen, sometimes it is a landscape.

For me, design is the process of giving structure to complexity.

A landscape architect may be balancing circulation, ecology, drainage, accessibility, culture, construction, maintenance, and human behavior. A product designer may be balancing information architecture, business logic, technical constraints, user expectations, and interaction patterns.

The medium changes, but the underlying responsibility is very similar.

Design is not simply creating form. It is deciding what matters, establishing relationships between different elements, testing those decisions, and translating them into something people can actually experience.

The final artifact may be a park, a drawing set, an interface, or an AI system. But the real design is the thinking that connects human needs with all of the invisible systems behind that artifact.

I believe designers should present the thinking behind the work, not only the final image.

A polished rendering can communicate aspiration, but it does not necessarily explain the quality of the design. I am usually more interested in seeing what the designer discovered, what constraints existed, what alternatives were considered, why certain decisions were made, and how the project evolved.

This is especially important in my own portfolio because much of the work is collaborative and technically complex. I like showing diagrams, sections, process studies, construction drawings, details, prototypes, and built results alongside the final visual story.

Presentation itself is also a design problem. The designer has to decide what information is essential and create a hierarchy that allows someone unfamiliar with the project to understand it quickly.

A strong presentation should make the logic of the project visible. It should not simply say, “Look what I made.” It should help the audience understand, “Here is the problem, here is how I thought about it, and here is why this solution exists.”

Design shapes access.

It influences who feels welcome in a public space, who can understand a digital service, how easily someone can move through a city, whether a child becomes curious about science, or whether complicated information becomes usable.

My public-space projects made this responsibility very tangible. Parks and civic landscapes are shared environments. Designers are making decisions that affect people with different ages, abilities, cultural backgrounds, and economic circumstances. Community engagement therefore becomes part of the design process, not simply a requirement around it.

The same principle applies to technology. As AI systems become more powerful, designers have a responsibility to make those systems understandable and accessible instead of allowing complexity to create another barrier.

I do not believe design alone solves social problems. But design determines how many systems in society are experienced. When done carefully, it can reduce friction, create dignity, encourage participation, and make opportunities more accessible.

That is a meaningful form of impact.

I think the boundaries between design disciplines will continue to dissolve.

AI is dramatically reducing the time required to generate images, interfaces, models, concepts, and variations. As production becomes easier, I believe the value of the designer will move increasingly toward judgment.

The important questions will become: Which problem should we solve? Which possibility is worth pursuing? What should we remove? What are the unintended consequences? And how do we turn an idea into something that works in the real world?

I also think designers will need to become more comfortable operating across systems. A future project might simultaneously involve spatial design, software, data, physical fabrication, behavioral research, and environmental performance.

This is one reason my own multidisciplinary path has become increasingly important to me. Landscape architecture taught me permanence, materiality, public responsibility, and technical discipline. Product design taught me rapid iteration, user research, and measurable feedback. AI is now changing the speed and scale at which both can happen.

Technology may produce more possibilities, but designers will still be responsible for deciding which possibilities deserve to become reality.

I start by trying to understand the problem before trying to design the solution.

My process can generally be summarized as:

Understand → Frame → Explore → Prototype → Resolve → Learn

First, I gather evidence. In a landscape project this might involve site observation, circulation, ecology, infrastructure, stakeholders, precedents, and technical constraints. In a digital product, it might involve user interviews, workflow observation, product data, and technical systems.

Then I frame the problem and establish a small number of design principles. These principles become a filter for later decisions.

Only then do I explore solutions. I prefer generating multiple possibilities early because it is inexpensive to make mistakes at that stage.

As the project develops, I gradually increase fidelity. Concepts become plans, sections, prototypes, technical details, construction documents, or production-ready specifications.

The final step is learning from implementation. Construction observation and usability testing are surprisingly similar: both reveal the gap between what the designer imagined and what actually happens.

That gap is one of the best places to learn.

I see technology as a design material and an amplifier, not as the purpose of design itself.

Different technologies allow me to think at different levels of fidelity. Sketching is still useful for thinking quickly. CAD helps establish precision and technical coordination. 3D modeling helps test spatial relationships. Visualization helps communicate atmosphere. Prototyping tools allow digital interactions to be tested before engineering. AI now makes it possible to explore and evaluate possibilities at extraordinary speed.

But faster generation does not automatically produce better design.

Technology can expand the number of answers available to us, but the designer still has to determine which question is worth answering.

Kherson Park is a useful example because technology exists at several layers: traditional landscape construction, custom play elements, lighting, fabrication, and an augmented-reality experience all contribute to the project. None of those technologies is meaningful by itself. Their value comes from how they work together to create curiosity and learning.

I therefore try to use technology where it strengthens human experience rather than allowing technology to become the experience.

Absolutely. Most meaningful design is collaborative.

Landscape architecture taught me this very early because no significant public project is created by one person. A park may involve community members, landscape architects, architects, civil engineers, structural engineers, ecologists, lighting designers, artists, fabricators, contractors, municipal staff, and many others.

Digital products are equally collaborative, involving users, product managers, researchers, engineers, data scientists, and business stakeholders.

My ideal design partners are people with strong expertise but low ego. I enjoy working with people who can defend their perspective rigorously while remaining willing to change their minds when better evidence appears.

I do not see collaboration as reaching the average of everyone's opinions. Good co-design requires structure. Someone still has to synthesize different perspectives, establish priorities, and maintain coherence.

For me, the designer often plays exactly that role: creating a framework in which many forms of expertise can contribute to one clear experience.

My professional practice has developed through several very different design environments rather than one conventional studio.
In landscape architecture, I spent several years at J.A. Brennan Associates in Seattle working on more than twenty public projects across Washington, including parks, waterfronts, trails, playgrounds, and civic landscapes. That experience gave me a rigorous understanding of what it takes to carry an idea from site analysis and public engagement through grading, planting, detailing, construction documents,s and eventually construction. My current landscape work continues to involve complex civic projects and multidisciplinary coordination.
In parallel, I have designed digital products with technology companies and AI startups, including enterprise productivity and automation systems. That second practice introduced me to rapid prototyping, behavioral research, usability testing, ng and data-driven iteration.
I therefore think of my "studio" less as a single office and more as a practice at the intersection of space, technology and human experience.

A designer constantly negotiates between competing conditions: human needs, engineering realities, environmental systems, cost, technology, time, and culture. The artifact at the end—a park, an interface, a chair, or an AI tool—is only the visible result of that negotiation.
For me, good design makes that complexity disappear. The user should experience clarity, not the hundreds of decisions required to produce it.

I am most interested in projects where experience, system, and story overlap.
That might be a civic landscape in which circulation, ecology, accessibility and cultural memory become one spatial experience, or an AI platform where information architecture, automation and human decision-making have to work together.
Kherson Park is a good example. It is a small urban park, but its ambition is larger than its footprint: it functions as a playground, gathering space, piece of civic storytelling,g and STEM-learning environment. I enjoy projects where design can transform something ordinary into a richer experience.

Kherson Park remains one of the projects closest to me because I watched it evolve from drawings into a real public place.
It is only about 0.44 acres in downtown Kent, Washington, but the project uses that compact space to tell an extraordinary local story. Kent played an important role in America's Apollo program; Boeing engineers in the area developed lunar rovers. Instead of treating this as simple historical information on a plaque, the design transforms that history into an experience. Children can encounter a Lunar Rover, climb through a Lunar Lander-inspired play structure, operate Mission Control elements, stand beside an astronaut, and interact with digital STEM content through the Space for Kidz augmented-reality program.
I worked on the project from concept design through construction documentation. I developed schematic alternatives and perspectives, then worked through the 60%, 90%, and 100% drawing sets, including layout, sections, planting, detailing, and site furnishings. Seeing children eventually occupy spaces I had previously understood as lines, dimensions, and material callouts was extremely meaningful.
I worked on the project from concept design through construction documentation. I developed schematic alternatives and perspectives, then worked through the 60%, 90%, and 100% drawing sets, including layout, sections, planting, detailing, and site furnishings. Seeing children eventually occupy spaces I had previously understood as lines, dimensions, and material callouts was extremely meaningful.
The A' Design Award recognition was gratifying, but what matters more to me is that the project demonstrates something I believe strongly: education does not always need to look educational. Sometimes learning can happen through curiosity, play, and discovery.

One of my earliest professional projects was residential landscape work in China, including a large mixed-use residential development in Hangzhou.
At that stage of my career, I spent enormous amounts of time drawing plans, building Rhino models, developing planting and material palettes, producing perspectives and testing detailed spatial alternatives. I was much closer to the craft of representation than to strategy.
That period was important because it taught me a lesson I still value: before a designer can direct a complex process, they have to learn how things are actually made. Craftsmanship develops through repetition—drawing a section correctly, understanding an edge condition, adjusting proportions by inches rather than feet.

My favorite "material" is probably information.
In landscape architecture, information might be topography, hydrology, pedestrian movement, soil conditions, cultural history, or construction tolerances. In UX design, it becomes user behavior, hierarchy, workflow,w and data.
I enjoy finding a structure within all of that information and then translating it into something intuitive.
As physical materials, I am drawn to concrete, steel, wood, od and planting because they age visibly and record time. Digitally, I am fascinated by AI because, unlike most conventional design materials, it is probabilistic and constantly changing. Designing with it requires us to rethink what control and authorship mean.

Usually, I understand the problem well enough to stop thinking about solutions.
At the beginning of a project, I try to absorb as much as possible—site conditions, user behavior, technical constraints, precedent, history, and stakeholder perspectives. There is often a point where those fragments suddenly begin connecting.
That moment is very exciting. For me, creativity is less about waiting for inspiration and more about building enough understanding that an unexpected connection becomes possible.

I pay particular attention to three things: behavior, transitions, and details.
Behavior asks whether people will actually understand and use what we designed.
Transitions are where systems meet: pavement and planting, building and landscape, human and AI, information and action. Many design failures happen at these interfaces.
And details determine whether the original idea survives implementation. My architectural training made me quite sensitive to this. Unresolved drainage, an awkward joint, poor grading, or an interface state nobody considered can compromise a beautiful concept.
I therefore try to work at the same time at the scale of the system and the scale of the detail.

Curiosity comes first.
There is also a productive kind of dissatisfaction. You keep looking at something and thinking, "This can be clearer. This relationship can be better. There must be another solution."
The most satisfying part comes when complexity begins resolving itself and what originally seemed like ten separate problems becomes one coherent idea.

Physical projects create a feeling that digital work rarely replicates.
For years, you know a landscape through CAD lines, elevations, sections, specifications and renderings. Then one day you stand inside it. The dimensions have become distances; hatch patterns have become materials; circles have become trees; and strangers begin using the place without knowing anything about the drawings behind it.
That is humbling.
At Kherson Park, seeing children immediately understand the space through play was especially powerful. The project no longer belonged to the designers. It belonged to them.

A successful design should work at three levels.
It must solve the immediate functional problem. It should create an emotional or cultural experience beyond pure function. And it should remain meaningful after the designer leaves.
I also believe successful design should feel inevitable in retrospect. People should look at the solution and think, "Of course it works this way," even though arriving at that simplicity may have required hundreds of iterations.

I ask: What problem is this actually solving, and for whom?
I try not to begin with style.
After that I evaluate coherence. Do form, material, interaction and purpose reinforce each other? Then I look at execution. A great concept that cannot survive technical implementation is incomplete design.
Finally, I consider longevity. Will this still make sense after the novelty disappears?

Designers change conditions for people who may never have an opportunity to participate in the design process.
That creates responsibility.
A landscape architect might make decisions affecting accessibility, habitat, water, public safety or community identity for decades. A UX designer can make decisions affecting information access, privacy, work and decision-making for millions of people.
In both fields, the designer controls invisible systems. We therefore have a responsibility to ask not only "Can we design this?" but "Who benefits, who may be excluded, and what consequences are we creating?"

I think the boundaries between design disciplines will continue disappearing.
AI is already changing the cost of visualization, prototyping, research synthesis and production. This does not eliminate designers; it changes where our value sits.
Producing an image or interface will become easier. Judgment becomes more valuable.
Future designers will need to understand systems, technology, human behavior, business, ethics and implementation. The strongest designers will probably look less like specialists executing one medium and more like integrators who can move between disciplines while maintaining a coherent point of view.
My own movement between landscape architecture and AI product design is partly a response to that future.

I rarely begin with visual references alone.
I look at people, infrastructure, engineering, landscapes, manufacturing, technology and ordinary behavior. Traveling between China and the United States has also made me sensitive to how different cultures solve similar problems differently.
I enjoy studying things outside my own discipline. Aerospace engineering became important to Kherson Park. Cognitive science and information architecture influence my digital work. Manufacturing influences how I think about physical objects.
Cross-disciplinary references prevent design from becoming self-referential.

I would describe my work as human-centered, systematic and quietly expressive.
I am not particularly interested in imposing a signature visual form on every project. I prefer discovering an identity from the project's specific context.
What is consistent is the process: understand the system, identify the essential experience, reduce unnecessary complexity, prototype alternatives, and then pursue the chosen idea with considerable attention to craft.
My landscape and UX practices reinforce each other here. Landscape architecture taught me permanence and material discipline; product design taught me speed and iteration.

I live in the United States and have spent much of my professional life in the Pacific Northwest, but I grew up in China and later studied and worked in several regions of the United States.
Moving between cultures has probably influenced my work more than any single national aesthetic.
It taught me to be suspicious of assumptions. Something that seems obvious in one cultural context may be interpreted completely differently in another. That experience makes listening particularly important to my process.
The advantage is a broader frame of reference. The challenge is that you sometimes feel permanently between categories. Eventually I began viewing that as an asset rather than a limitation.

My process usually has six overlapping stages:
Understand → Frame → Explore → Prototype → Resolve → Learn.
I begin by collecting evidence rather than solutions: site conditions, user observations, technical requirements, stakeholder perspectives and precedents.
Then I frame the core problem and establish principles that allow us to judge alternatives.
Exploration is intentionally broad. In landscape work that can mean plans, sections, physical relationships and material studies; in UX it may involve information architecture, user flows and rapid prototypes.
Once a direction is selected, I become increasingly rigorous. I resolve dimensions, interaction states, grading, material transitions, technical feasibility and edge conditions.
The final step is often ignored: learning after implementation. Construction observation in landscape architecture and usability analytics in digital design serve a similar purpose—they reveal where our assumptions were correct and where reality behaved differently.

I tend to value objects that reveal how they were made rather than objects that simply look luxurious.
Five types of objects I particularly enjoy are a well-designed mechanical keyboard, a simple task lamp, a carefully made chair, small 3D-printed prototypes and sketchbooks.
They represent five things I appreciate in design: interaction, light, ergonomics, fabrication and thinking.
I like objects that become more interesting when you examine the detail.

Learn to make things before trying to become a design strategist.
Draw the section. Build the prototype. Visit construction. Observe the user. Learn why something failed.
Early in a career, technical craft can sometimes feel less glamorous than ideation, but craft creates judgment. Eventually you need that judgment to know which ideas deserve to survive.
I would also encourage young designers to move outside their discipline. Architecture made me a better UX designer, and UX made me reconsider how I approach physical environments.
Your unusual combination of experiences may ultimately become more valuable than perfect specialization.

The positive is that designers are professionally allowed to remain curious. We can enter unfamiliar worlds, learn how they work and imagine alternatives.
The difficult part is that we see imperfections everywhere.
Once you learn to analyze circulation, typography, accessibility, interfaces, fabrication or spatial proportion, it becomes difficult to stop noticing them.
Design also requires becoming comfortable with unfinished thinking. You spend a surprising amount of your professional life not knowing the correct answer yet.

Never let the solution become more important than the person using it.
A designer can become emotionally attached to an elegant concept. But when evidence shows that people misunderstand it, cannot access it or simply do not need it, the designer has to be willing to change.
The idea serves the user—not the other way around.

Judgment is the most important, although it is composed of many smaller skills.
You need empathy to understand people, analytical ability to understand systems, visual literacy to communicate, technical knowledge to implement, and enough humility to revise your assumptions.
Communication is also underrated. Most significant design projects are collaborative. The designer who can make a complex problem understandable to engineers, clients, communities and decision-makers can often create more impact than the designer with the most beautiful sketch.

My years working on public landscapes in Washington created the foundation for almost everything I do now.
At J.A. Brennan Associates I worked across more than twenty civic projects and gradually moved from supporting design work to producing complete construction-document packages, coordinating consultants and participating in public engagement and construction support.
Projects such as Kherson Park and Kayak Point taught me that design has consequences beyond the presentation. A grading decision affects drainage. A circulation decision affects accessibility. A detail affects maintenance years later.
Later, when I moved into UX and AI products, I carried that accountability with me. I still ask: what happens when this design leaves Figma and encounters reality?

I enjoy work where the designer has to move between strategy and craft.
I do not want only to define the concept, and I do not want only to execute somebody else's decisions.
I enjoy understanding the problem, developing the system, testing possibilities and then staying involved long enough to resolve the details.
That is one reason landscape architecture has influenced me so deeply: you may begin with a civic vision and eventually find yourself discussing a quarter-inch steel connection. Both decisions belong to the same design.

Both, but significant design is almost always collaborative.
Landscape architecture made this unavoidable. A public project can involve landscape architects, civil and structural engineers, ecologists, architects, lighting designers, public agencies, contractors and community members.
Kherson Park itself resulted from collaboration between the City of Kent, J.A. Brennan Associates and specialized partners responsible for elements such as the custom play environment and interactive features.
I may personally develop an idea or detail, but good collaboration usually makes it more intelligent.