As artificial intelligence and digital infrastructures continue reshaping industries, the gap between complex technologies and human experience has become increasingly visible. Across healthcare, sustainable energy, and urban mobility, many organizations have accelerated digital transformation efforts, yet efficiency alone often fails to create systems that people can truly understand and trust. For award-winning product designer Zhongqi Fu, this challenge has become the center of her multidisciplinary practice.
DESIGN
What distinguishes Fu is her ability to enter technically complex systems and design the human decision layers that make them usable, trustworthy, and scalable. Originally trained in architecture, Fu earned her Bachelor of Architecture from Huazhong University of Science and Technology before completing her Master of Architecture at Columbia University in New York. After graduation, she worked at Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA), one of the leading architecture firms in the United States, where she began questioning how design could move beyond physical space into human behavior, interaction, and decision-making. That shift eventually led her to transition into UX/UI and product design, bringing with her a systems-thinking mindset rooted in architecture.
Designing Human-Centered Infrastructure in Sustainable Energy
Fu’s most defining early experience came in the renewable energy sector, where she worked as the solo product designer leading 0-to-1 enterprise software initiatives inside highly technical industrial environments.
At hydrogen startup LIFTE H2, Fu joined as the founding product designer and established the company’s earliest design system, branding language, and UX foundation for its industrial IoT monitoring platform. The platform enabled hydrogen production companies and infrastructure vendors to remotely monitor live operational data and equipment performance across large-scale hydrogen supply chains. Her work helped the company expand internationally, securing clients across Europe and South Africa before its acquisition by Electric Hydrogen in 2023.
Following the acquisition, Fu continued her work at Electric Hydrogen, a Massachusetts-based clean energy unicorn startup, where she served as the lead product designer across multiple enterprise platforms. One of the company’s most critical systems was the Asset Performance Management platform, designed to support large-scale hydrogen production infrastructure.
Working as the only product designer within a highly engineering-driven organization, Fu developed an immersive user research methodology by embedding herself directly into hydrogen production workflows. Instead of relying only on interviews, she observed operators on production floors to understand how teams monitored data, responded to alerts, and coordinated maintenance under pressure.
Through this process, she identified a major operational issue: fragmented monitoring systems prevented workers from quickly understanding alert severity or coordinating responses across departments, leading to delayed maintenance and higher failure risks. Fu redesigned the experience through scalable UX systems that consolidated live operational data, prioritized alerts, and introduced automated notifications with clearer action pathways. Her work supported the company’s ability to scale enterprise product infrastructure during a period of rapid growth that included its $380 million Series C financing.
Reimagining Healthcare and Emotional AI Systems
While working across industrial infrastructure, Fu also began exploring how intelligent systems could support emotional well-being and healthcare experiences.
One of her most recognized projects, YO-YO, examines the relationship between AI and emotional care. Designed as an AI-assisted mental health companion for children, the project combines a physical interactive toy with a connected mobile platform that monitors emotional and physiological signals while encouraging communication between children and parents. Rather than positioning AI as a replacement for human relationships, the project explores how technology can support empathy and emotional awareness within families.
The project received international recognition including the Red Dot Design Award, A’ Design Award, Asia Design Prize Gold Winner, MUSE Design Awards, Titan Health Awards, and London Design Awards. These recognitions are significant because they came from design, healthcare, innovation, and product award contexts, reflecting that Fu’s work has been evaluated across multiple dimensions rather than only as visual interface design.
In 2025, Fu joined Reveleer, one of the leading healthcare SaaS companies in the United States, as a Senior Product Designer. There, she leads experience design across enterprise systems involving healthcare enrollment, insurance workflows, and AI-assisted data evaluation platforms serving millions of users.
Fu’s work has focused on redesigning enrollment and data-review workflows so that healthcare teams can move from fragmented legacy tools into clearer, AI-assisted decision pathways. By simplifying workflows, introducing scalable design systems, and creating clearer decision-making pathways, Fu helped support customers’ migration away from legacy systems toward more streamlined digital experiences. Several major healthcare organizations across the U.S., including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Baylor Scott & White, AllCare Health, and Medical Card System, adopted the platform to improve workflow clarity and reduce operational friction, with product development continuing into 2026.
Speculating on Future Mobility Systems
Beyond her professional work, Fu continues exploring speculative design projects connecting physical infrastructure, AI, and urban experience.
Her award-winning project Unibike reimagines urban mobility through an ecosystem combining shared bicycles, detachable user-owned batteries, and AI-assisted mobile interfaces. By separating the battery from the bicycle itself, the project addresses issues associated with traditional e-bikes, including heavy hardware systems and high maintenance costs. Its mobile platform also introduces incentive-based behavioral systems that encourage users to rebalance bicycle distribution across cities through dynamic rewards.
The project proposes a decentralized mobility model where transportation, portable energy, and intelligent digital systems operate together as part of everyday urban life.
Although speculative, the project has moved beyond concept through award recognition, patent protection, and exhibition selection. Since 2024, Unibike has received recognition from Core77, MUSE Design Awards, Titan Innovation Awards, and NY Product Design Awards, while also securing a utility patent in China. In 2026, the project will be exhibited in New York as part of Utopia. & A’Design Award International Exhibition – CARBON x SILICON: The Agentic Shift.
What distinguishes Fu is that she repeatedly enters technically complex, high-stakes systems – hydrogen infrastructure, healthcare data, and mobility networks – and turns them into usable decision environments for the people who operate them.
Across renewable energy, healthcare, AI, and mobility, Fu’s work consistently explores one central question: how can increasingly intelligent systems remain deeply human? Rather than treating design as surface-level interface creation, her practice positions UX as infrastructure – shaping how people understand, trust, and participate in the technological systems surrounding them.
Words by DSCENE Editor Maya Lane.
