Interviews with Jizheng Guan

My interest in art and design started since childhood through painting, drawing, and learning about various cultures. I drifted away in high school when I did not see a clear path or much support and spent the next decade pursuing business and technology studies and careers. At Cornell and later in systematic trading, I acquired strong technical skills and learned how to create sophisticated systems that supported high-stake decision making. Over time, I realized design felt closest to what I truly cared about: identity, expression, and how people experience the world. Now I am able to consolidate my background in art, technology, and analytics to build beautiful and functional projects.

I focus on intention and emotional truth. I begin by making detailed observations, then translate those insights into structures. I like to think of each design as creating a world. It should have both clear operating logic and atmosphere. I use drawing, prototypes, code, and AI systems, to create designs that are structured, immersive, and expressive.

In the beginning, I start design with immense intellectual curiosity and excitement, when I feel genuinely intrigued by people’s intention and what we could achieve. There is usually a period where the idea feels unclear, and I have to sit with that uncertainty and tension. When the form begins to emerge, I feel a sense of quiet energy. It feels like discovering what the work wanted to become. At which point, I would let the design flow through me to completion.

Finance and technology taught me rigor, systems thinking, and how to implement creative ideas that scale. Drawing taught me to observe details, atmosphere, and structures. My cross-cultural background also shapes how I think about identity, belonging, and means of expression. These influences bring me to designs that are both technically grounded and emotionally meaningful.

I am exploring 67 Story Studio, interactive story worlds that help children learn across cultures and approach unfamiliar backgrounds with curiosity. I am also developing ideas around city sketch-walks and digital experiences for overlooked local places. On top of digital experiences, I am looking into how to realize industrial designs that make work and life more intuitive and comfortable.

My dream project is a creative studio where art and technology come together. It would create products and experiences for families, authentic brands, cultural places, and communities. The goal would be to help people express who they are and their imagination with clarity and beauty.

I think a design is successful when it creates a living structure. It gives ideas, resources, and actions a clear way to flow. People have room to breathe inside it. I think of a good design as building a small world with its own logic, atmosphere, and purpose. It should solve the right problem and help people thrive every time they return to it.

Living in New York exposes me to different cultures and rhythms of living. My own background also makes me sensitive to questions related to identity and belonging. I build systems, meet people, and keep realizing everything is connected. Conversations, city sketches, kendo practices, language learning are all ways to understand the world. Those experiences gave me both inspiration and places to apply them.

Participating in A’Design awards created a moment of reflection for me. I had an opportunity to clarify my intention, articulate my process, and present my work to a broader creative audience. Winning the awards helped map out some directions of a bigger creative journey.

The main idea behind Sparkhood is helping people move from vague intention into clear action. After graduation, I volunteered to help over 100 alumni students in one-to-one sessions for professional development. Many of them had energy, interests, and ambition, but felt stuck, afraid to try, or unsure how to begin. In the AI era, tools and resources are everywhere, but there is less opportunity to safely explore for many young people. Sparkhood was created to close that gap. It helps people start before they feel fully ready, turning inner sparks into visible and personal steps.

My main focus was to make self-reflection less abstract and more actionable. Instead of creating another productivity system, I wanted the experience to feel calm, encouraging, and human. Sparkhood breaks complex goals into small steps, supports users when resistance appears, and helps them understand their own patterns through actions. The goal is to help people try, observe, and learn. Even if they stop or change direction, they still understand themselves better.

I plan to continue developing Sparkhood into a public digital experience with improved interaction flows, and adaptive behaviors powered by AI. I want to explore how it can support students, creators, young professionals, and people going through transitions. In the future, I hope Sparkhood can become part of a broader practice around identity, AI systems, and human-centered design.

This project was not commissioned. It came from my own inspiration and from a personal transition in my life. While working in systematic trading and data analytics, I became interested in using technology not only for optimization, but also for self-understanding. Sparkhood became a project to explore how software can help people understand what matters to them and move toward it bravely.

The target users are people who have goals, interests, or inner energy, but feel blocked when trying to act. This includes students, creators, young professionals, and people going through career or identity transitions. Sparkhood is especially for people need a clear structure, and a gentle starting point.

Many tools help people manage tasks, but fewer help people understand why they hesitate, what they truly want, and how to begin without feeling fully ready. Sparkhood allowed me to combine my technical background in systems with my interest in identity, emotional truth, and lived experience.

The name Sparkhood combines “spark” and “hood.” “Spark” represents the first moment of energy and inspiration in a person. “Hood” suggests an environment, or community where that spark can grow into something real. Together, Sparkhood means a supportive world where inner energy can be shaped and turned into action, accompanied by avatars that wear spark shaped hoodies that grow with people.

The most unique aspect is that Sparkhood treats hesitation and resistance as design material. Instead of assuming users only need motivation, the system helps them accept their inner resistance as something visible and workable. It turns goals into a lived experience, where users can interact with guidance, friction, and small steps. In this way, the app helps users build identity through action.

The system uses prompt design, agent-based logic, and modular UI blocks to generate tasks, characters, and interactions in real time. The interface adapts to the user’s state, keeping attention on the current step. I used technologies to resolve complexity in an uncertain situation, helping users stay present instead of feeling overwhelmed.

The project was influenced by both analytical thinking and qualitative observation. Through more than 100 one-to-one sessions with alumni students, I noticed that people often judge themselves when facing difficulty. A key research insight was that people can observe a problem with more distance and compassion. Sparkhood builds on this insight by turning resistance into characters, then combining that with adaptive small actions and reflection.

One challenge was balancing between structure and openness. If the system is too rigid, it feels like a productivity app. If it is too loose, it may not help users act. Another challenge was representing problems as characters without making the experience feel distracting. On the technical side, the real-time generation of UI, characters, tasks, and interactions had to remain consistent and clear.

I decided to submit Sparkhood because I wanted to place the work in a broader design conversation. The project connects AI, interface design, identity, and everyday human behavior, so I felt it could speak to an international audience. Preparing the submission also helped me clarify the concept and communicate it as a complete design system.

I learned that design is not only about function, but also about emotional truth. A useful system should help people understand where they are, what they feel, and how to begin. Sparkhood helped me connect my technical background with my artistic and personal experiences. It also made me more confident in becoming a designer who can bridge systems and human experience.

I studied computer science, mathematics, and financial engineering at Cornell University, and I currently work in systematic trading and data analytics in New York. My formal background is technical, but much of my creative practice comes from drawing and sincere intellectual curiosity of cultures. Now I am able to combine my technical and creative background to make and implement new designs.

I think a design is successful when it creates a living structure. It gives ideas, resources, and actions a clear way to flow. People have room to breathe inside it. I think of a good design as building a small world with its own logic, atmosphere, and purpose. It should solve the right problem and help people thrive every time they return to it.

My dream project is a creative studio where art and technology come together. It would create products and experiences for families, authentic brands, cultural places, and communities. The goal would be to help people express who they are and their imagination with clarity and beauty.

I see design as an act that gives intention a clear and useful form. It can be an interface, an object, a space, or a system. To me, good design helps people understand and express themselves more clearly and deeply. It is where observation and intuition become structure.

I am exploring interactive story worlds that help children learn across cultures and approach unfamiliar backgrounds with curiosity. I am also developing ideas around city sketch-walks and digital experiences for overlooked local places. On top of digital experiences, I am looking into how to realize industrial designs that make work and life more intuitive and comfortable.

I think one of a designer’s responsibilities is to recognize what is worth amplifying. When I see good intentions, genuine interest, or a meaningful idea, I want to create structures that help them grow. Design shapes how attention, behavior, resources, and care move through the world. In that sense, designers contribute to the current in the river of human history, deciding what to strengthen and what to make easier.

I believe design is becoming more adaptive and less static. With AI and other cutting edge production tools, designers can understand deeper. They can move faster from idea to prototype and to final product. The future of design is more holistic and collaborative. Designers would have new opportunities to evolve and iterate with the people they design for.

I was always curious about how things worked and why things were the way they were. That curiosity applied to many aspects of my life, from school to hobbies. I was eager to learn about interesting structures and how to incorporate them in some drawings or handcrafts. This curiosity put me on track to become a designer.

learning about various cultures. I drifted away in high school when I did not see a clear path or much support and spent the next decade pursuing business and technology studies and careers. At Cornell and later in systematic trading, I acquired strong technical skills and learned how to create sophisticated systems that supported high-stake decision making. Over time, I realized design felt closest to what I truly cared about: identity, expression, and how people experience the world. Now I am able to consolidate my background in art, technology, and analytics to build beautiful and functional projects.

I see design as an act that gives intention a clear and useful form. It can be an interface, an object, a space, or a system. To me, good design helps people understand and express themselves more clearly and deeply. It is where observation and intuition become structure.

In the beginning, I start design with immense intellectual curiosity and excitement, when I feel genuinely intrigued by people’s intention and what we could achieve. There is usually a period where the idea feels unclear, and I have to sit with that uncertainty and tension. When the form begins to emerge, I feel a sense of quiet energy. It feels like discovering what the work wanted to become. At which point, I would let the design flow through me to completion.

I think a design is successful when it creates a living structure. It gives ideas, resources, and actions a clear way to flow. People have room to breathe inside it. I think of a good design as building a small world with its own logic, atmosphere, and purpose. It should solve the right problem and help people thrive every time they return to it.

I think one of a designer’s responsibilities is to recognize what is worth amplifying. When I see good intentions, genuine interest, or a meaningful idea, I want to create structures that help them grow. Design shapes how attention, behavior, resources, and care move through the world. In that sense, designers contribute to the current in the river of human history, deciding what to strengthen and what to make easier.

I believe design is becoming more adaptive and less static. With AI and other cutting edge production tools, designers can understand deeper. They can move faster from idea to prototype and to final product. The future of design is more holistic and collaborative. Designers would have new opportunities to evolve and iterate with the people they design for.

I focus on intention and emotional truth. I begin by making detailed observations, then translate those insights into structures. I like to think of each design as creating a world. It should have both clear operating logic and atmosphere. I use drawing, prototypes, code, and AI systems, to create designs that are structured, immersive, and expressive.

Living in New York exposes me to different cultures and rhythms of living. My own background also makes me sensitive to questions related to identity and belonging. I build systems, meet people, and keep realizing everything is connected. Conversations, city sketches, kendo practices, language learning are all ways to understand the world. Those experiences gave me both inspiration and places to apply them.

Observation is the most important skill. After that, communication, taste, systems thinking, technical fluency, and empathy all matter. A designer needs to have structure. They also need humility to test their assumptions.

My dream project is a creative studio where art and technology come together. It would create products and experiences for families, authentic brands, cultural places, and communities. The goal would be to help people express who they are and their imagination with clarity and beauty.

I am exploring 67 Story Studio, interactive story worlds that help children learn across cultures and approach unfamiliar backgrounds with curiosity. I am also developing ideas around city sketch-walks and digital experiences for overlooked local places. On top of digital experiences, I am looking into how to realize industrial designs that make work and life more intuitive and comfortable.

I decided to personify the future self after observing that many people do not lack ambition, but the possibilities are too far away to act on. I noticed that empty progress checkers and crowded dashboards often discourage people by over-emphasizing the distance between where they were and where they wanted to be. Therefore, I wanted Sparkhood to do something different, to accompany people by a possible version of themselves.The future self is not designed to be fantastic or authoritative. It is a clear, calm, and grounded presence embodying the user’s own intention forward. Instead of saying condescendingly, “You should already be this.” It says, “This direction exists. And we can take a small step towards it.”

The most important aspect of Sparkhood is to make it supportive instead of becoming another system of pressure. Many personal development tools unintentionally bond growth with performance. They ask users to track more, optimize more, compare more, and complete more, while people I am designing for are often already overwhelmed. Instead of adding extra pressure, Sparkhood provides a clear and gentle way to begin. So I designed Sparkhood around smallness and focus. It is not a system that asks people to solve their whole life. It breaks a complex goal into approachable small actions and keeps attention on the current step. Hesitation is also treated as information instead of failure. The system gives resistance a form that allows users to observe it from a little distance.This also involves a language challenge. The interface avoids overly cheerful motivational language during the users’ most vulnerable moments. It also avoids clinical or diagnostic language because the app is not trying to define the user. It adopts a warm, structured, and quite tone to communicate. These create a breathable structure that helps intention, thought, and action flow, while leaving ample space for people to acknowledge uncertainty and self-direct.

It’s a real challenge to make generation disciplined. In Sparkhood the interface could not feel random, over expressive, or visually unstable, because the user is often entering the experience from a state of uncertainty. Trustworthiness and adaptiveness are equally important to the system. I designed the architecture as a set of emotional and functional states. User input such as goals, frictions, emotions are mapped to structured states. Then the states determine what kind of UI, task, character or scene should appear. The interface is composed of modular UI blocks, such as goal, resistance, future-self prompt, action card, reflection moment. All the pieces can change but they are orchestrated by consistent underlying logic backed by scene graphs and grids. Human and well-designed systems always sit at the center. They arrange and utilize LLM and assets as resources to create a meaningful experience together.

The most important insight was noticing that people often turn difficulty into self-judgement. A person often begins with a practical problem, such as not knowing what career direction to choose or not knowing how to start a complex project. But very quickly, that practical problem becomes an identity statement yelling “I am behind”, “I am not disciplined”, or “I am not talented enough”. Once the problem becomes the self, action becomes much harder.Sparkhood is designed to transform this pattern. By turning resistance into a character, the system gives users a way to see the problem without becoming the problem. This little distance creates compassion, and compassion can make action possible again. Preserving this insight in an AI system needs restraint. I do not want the system to imitate a human counselor or replace human dialogue. Instead, I want it to translate emotional friction into a design structure. The application provides form, narrations, and next steps, but the user is still the final authority on what feels true.

The most important boundary is that the resistance character should not represent the user’s identity or emotion as a fixed psychological type. In Sparkhood, the character represents the specific problem or resistance the user is facing around the goal. It externalizes the obstacle instead of labeling the person.Creatively, the character need to visualize the resistance without making it feel shameful. It could be playful and expressive but should never mock the user’s struggle. I also do not want it to feel like an enemy that needs to be destroyed, because wisdom often follows resistance. Sparkhood makes the obstacle easier to observe, question, and act, giving the user’s intention a place to pass the resistance and to grow.

The early concept of Sparkhood came from several parts of my life that did not seem connected at first. My background in math, data, and computer science taught me to regulate uncertainties and state changes with systems and feedback loops. From my artistic practices, such as painting and sketching, I learned to see atmosphere, scenes, and emotions. The one-to-one conversations with students gave the project its human center and purpose.The moment these threads began to cohere came when I stopped thinking Sparkhood as a goal app that squeezed performances out of user. I began to see it as a space for understanding. Many people do not need more discipline. They need a way to understand what they want, what is blocking them, and what action they can take to begin. My background in data-driven systems still shaped the structure of the product. But on top of that, I wanted it to feel warmer than dashboards. It provides both logical clarity and emotional recognition to help users understand the problem and themselves better.

The next step is adaptive experience design that understands context, generates relevant assets, and helps people act in more personal ways. Sparkhood explores this direction by combining future-self simulation, resistance clarification, small action, and reflection into one experience.The most important principle is to encourage action. Many people wait until they are certain to begin. But clarity often comes after tiny, even clumsy interaction with the real world. Sparkhood facilitates that starting point before user feels fully ready, encouraging people to learn from what happens.

I hope Sparkhood contributes to a more human centered direction for agentic UI and generative AI applications. Much discussion around this field focuses on speed, automation, and productivity. Those are important, but I am more interested in how AI can free people to move with more clarity and self-understanding. Sparkhood does that by starting emotional momentum in a quiet, focused manner. The aspect I think deserves more attention is the quietness of the design. The most visible parts are the characters or the generative UI, but the deeper work is in pacing, boundaries, and emotional restraint. Sparkhood protects one small moment of action without becoming manipulative or overwhelming. When technology can generate endlessly, designers must decide what should be amplified. Sparkhood chooses to amplify user’s genuine interest, courage, and power to begin.

I think it is important to design for the reality that people do not complete every goal, and that this does not always mean failure. Sometimes a person stops because the goal was not actually theirs. Sometimes the timing was wrong. Sometimes the first attempt reveals something more accurate than the original plan. If a system only celebrates completion, it deviates from how people actually grow.Sparkhood treats incompletion as information. In the reflection step after a session, the system doesn’t stop at checking whether user finishes a task, but highlights what they noticed: where does friction come from, what feels meaningful, what feels forced, what changed in their understanding. And the design language around stopping is deliberately non-punitive. Instead of using harsh streak loss or shame messaging, it asks what the user learned and what might be adjusted. It is important to preserve momentum, but not all momentum looks like linear progress. This is very important because only the user can know what truly fits. Sparkhood doesn’t trap user inside old and rigid intentions. It helps them listen to their own experiences and reveal the next most genuine direction.

I would encourage young designers to see that technical capability and emotional intelligence must develop together. More capability does not automatically create better design. With AI, it’s easy to answer, “What can this system generate?” But more important questions are, “What does the user need in this precise moment?” and “What should the system avoid doing?” At the intersection of behavioral science and adaptive digital experience, designers need to think in systems and observe real life simultaneously. I also believe designers should learn to build little worlds. The world doesn’t have to be large and fictional. They can be small products with their own governing logic and purposes. People should be able to enter the world, understand how to move, and experience structures that are made with great care.Technology can amplify anything from desire, anxiety, confusion, to attention, and courage. The designer must choose carefully. When I see good intention, genuine interest, or a meaningful idea, I would love to build the structure that helps it thrive. That is core to my responsibility and my designs.