2026

Zhiying Zhu

I’m Zhiying Zhu, and my practice focuses on digital experiences, visual storytelling, and interactive visuals. Through websites, TouchDesigner videos, zines, posters, and booklets, I explore the relationship between visual language, space, materiality, and public engagement.

In my recent projects, I have been working across two main directions. One project, Re:Paper, focuses on paper waste on campus, using websites, publications, and visual experiments to reconsider the value and possibilities of discarded paper. Another project is based in South Kensington, where I used TouchDesigner visuals, sound, movement, and spatial data to explore the relationship between emotion and place, transforming human feelings and environmental experiences into visualised digital interactions.

By combining research, digital media, and experimental visual approaches, I hope to encourage audiences not only to observe, but also to participate, reflect, and reconnect with the relationship between people, materials, and space.

Re:Paper

Re:Paper is a design project about reusing waste paper on campus, created collaboratively with my team member, Yu Jiang. The project began from everyday observations of paper waste at LCC. Whether it was the bins beside printers or large amounts of unused paper being thrown away after class, I started to question whether discarded paper should only be seen as ‘waste’, or whether it could also become a creative material with new value and meaning.

As part of the project, we created a website as the main platform for presenting and communicating our work. The website combines our logo, visual identity, paper experiments, zines, booklets, and project research. Through these elements, we documented how we collected, organised, scanned, deconstructed, and recomposed discarded paper materials, transforming something often overlooked into a new visual language.

Within the project, I was mainly responsible for the website design, visual identity development, zine and booklet production, page layouts, and the digital presentation of the project. I also contributed to the visual experiments by exploring the textures, structures, and compositions of waste paper through scanning and digital editing. Through both the website and printed outcomes, I wanted to create a more engaging and visually driven way for audiences to rethink the creative potential hidden within everyday discarded materials.

For me, the project is not simply about ‘recycling paper’, but about reconsidering how people perceive waste materials. I believe that when discarded paper is carefully observed, reorganised, and recreated through design, it can shift from being something thrown away into a resource for making, communicating ideas, and opening up discussion.

Re:Paper is a collaborative platform for reusing and revaluing waste paper through creative exchange, workshops, and design experimentation.

An experimental zine exploring how discarded paper can be transformed into new visual and emotional experiences through texture, colour, and composition.

Emotional Cartography: Mapping Spatial Emotion in South Kensington

This project investigates how urban environments construct emotional experiences through spatial conditions, movement, sound, and visual density, translating these invisible emotional changes into data-driven cartographic and immersive visual systems.

A research publication documenting the translation of spatial emotion into maps, diagrams, visual systems, and immersive data-driven experiments across South Kensington.

Emotional Cartography visualises how urban environments shape emotional experience through movement, sound, spatial density, and human perception.

An immersive moving-image experiment exploring how sound, movement, and spatial atmosphere construct emotional experience within South Kensington.

Emotional Cartography visualises how urban environments shape emotional experience through movement, sound, spatial density, and human perception.

Zhiying Zhu

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