Yijie Ding

I picked up Figma in a freshman class at CCA and never closed the tab. Code came earlier — I'd been writing my way through small projects since high school. These days I ship with AI in the loop, partly because I got tired of handing off prototypes that didn't move the way I drew them. Most of what I make now lives in both files and code — once as a sketch to learn it, once as something that runs to keep it honest.

Games have been the most useful teacher. More than any other software category, they make the silent contracts between interface and user legible — what the HUD owes attention, how onboarding earns the next button, why a single haptic frame can feel like trust. I try to drag those instincts into product design.

My interest sits where interaction design meets language, voice, and time. I think a lot about what an interface promises, what it's allowed to do when no one is looking, what it should refuse. My senior thesis, Animus, came out of those questions: how to design something that listens to a person and remembers them, without pretending to be them.

This fall I'm moving up to Seattle to start a master's at the University of Washington — Technology Innovation. I chose it because it sits between design, engineering, and policy, which is roughly where the work has been pointing for a while.

When I'm not at my desk, I photograph typography in the wild, keep long-form notes in Markdown, and look for the cafe in any new city that still respects an A4 sheet.

Chronology

2026 — Fall

Begin Master's in Technology Innovation at the University of Washington (UW MSTI), Seattle.

2026 — Summer

Available for design residencies, internships, or design-engineering collaborations. Open to West Coast and remote.

2026 — Spring

Senior Thesis at California College of the Arts — Animus, a conversational layer over recorded voice and writing.

2025 — Jul–Nov

Product Intern at KuCoin (remote).

2025

TouchlessGo— gesture control for older drivers, so phone functions don't require hunting for buttons.

2024 — Apr–May

Design Intern on Microsoft Teams (remote).

2024

Tempo — a versatile work-buddy plugin designed to support the rhythm of daily tasks.

2022

Started BFA Interaction Design at CCA, San Francisco.

The toolkit

How I work

Solo when the question is unfamiliar; with collaborators (human and AI) when the question is heavy. On Animus I worked as design and product lead with three AI agents on the build side — Claude as architect, Codex on the server, Gemini on the front end — and a formal review at every plan and every diff. The discipline forced every meaty decision into writing first, which is the part I've come to like most.

I'd rather ship a small, deliberate thing than a large vague one. I write the spec before the prompt; the prompt before the code. I keep a list of things I've refused to build.