#DesignEducator #DesignResearcher #DesignPractitioner #MultidisciplinaryBackground #AnalyticalCreative #FirstGenImmigrant
01

About

Yvette Shen is a designer, researcher, and educator. She is Associate Professor of Visual Communication Design at The Ohio State University. Her work explores how design helps people make sense of complex information and systems, across information design, data visualization, user experience, and design pedagogy.

Her current research follows two threads sharing one premise: what gets made carries the marks of the process that made it, and of the experience readers bring to it.

  • One thread reads data and interfaces as records of the process behind them. Decisions taken far upstream, about what to collect and what to set aside, stay legible in the final display, where each reader meets them with prior habits of looking.

  • The second carries that premise into AI-supported practice, asking where visual reasoning, authorship, and designerly judgment sit once generation becomes a step in the process.

    • Both threads run through her studio courses, where methods take shape with students before they reach publication.

    Born and raised in Shanghai, she trained in fashion design, computer science, and visual communication design. That path informs how she teaches, treating design as a means of making complexity visible and of putting assumptions under pressure.