Zichen Gao

I’m a designer, dreamer, and nature enthusiast. My love for art and design shapes the work that I do.

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This book tells the story of a hazardous chemical truck driver on a long-distance delivery journey. Through field interviews and in-depth conversations, we documented his five-day trip in detail. As part of the project, we applied a quantitative approach and documented all of the driver’s activities during the five-day journey, detailing what he did at each time segment. Based on this, we analyzed his “Sleepiness” levels while driving and visualized it. Using this data as a narrative thread for the entire book. The result is a road diary that reconstructs a little-known yet meaningful journey the driver took over a decade ago.

This project explores how social media algorithms create fragmented realities. The same video can generate entirely different comment sections based on a user’s gender, age, or interests. People become enclosed in information bubbles that reinforce their own views, rarely encountering opposing perspectives. Through visual experiments and interface design, this project questions the structure of digital echo chambers and encourages users to step outside their algorithmic comfort zones.

ZENFARE is an app that allows users to pre-plan and personalize their own funeral. This project centers around designing a funeral planning app that encourages users to calmly engage with the topic of death. Instead of avoiding it, the app offers a respectful and personalized space where individuals can plan their own farewell, from selecting service details to choosing meaningful items and rituals.

This project explores the oversimplification of labeling. Through interactive tagging systems and visual metaphors like the mosaic, we invite users to question definitions imposed on them. Labels may offer shortcuts to understanding, but they can’t capture who we truly are. Our goal is to create space for ambiguity, contradiction, and individuality beyond the surface.