About

Yvette Shen is a designer, researcher, and educator, currently Associate Professor and Aea Coordinator of Visual Communication Design at The Ohio State University. She also serves on the AIGA Design Educators Community board, where she contributes to a national network of design edcuators, researchers, and practitioners.

Born and raised in Shanghai, her work is shaped by movement across cultures, disciplines, and modes of making. Her practice has evolved through design, research, teaching, and collaboration.

With training in fashion design, computer science, and visual communication design, Yvette began her career as an interactive designer working across industries, including pharmaceutical research, media, mobility, art, and culture.

Today, her work focuses on information design, data visualization, user experience, and design pedagogy. She is especially interested in how people make sense of complex information, systems, and technologies. Her current research examines data, interfaces, and design tools as situated and interpretive systems rather than neutral channels of information. Through self-collected data, material data practices, UX methods, co-design, and AI-supported visualization processes, she investigates how designers and students make meaning through choices of collection, structure, interaction, representation, and interpretation.

Her recent work also explores how generative AI is reshaping design education and creative practice, with particular attention to visual reasoning, authorship, judgment, and designerly agency.

Understanding empowers. Creativity connects. Good design brings clarity with intention.

Design is about how systems work, how information supports people, and how experiences invite engagement. Every design decision, large or small, carries assumptions about what matters, who is included, and how meaning is made. Her work is grounded in the belief that design can make complex issues more visible and actionable.

Yvette works through research, prototyping, teaching, and collaboration. She integrates design research, visualization, UX methods, participatory practices, and material experimentation to develop visual systems and learning experiences that make complex information legible, usable, and meaningful.

By working closely with students, stakeholders, domain experts, and communities, she builds frameworks that support sensemaking, critical reflection, and more equitable access to information.