Yiran Mao, Zaiying Li, Qianyue Yuwen, Hongming Li.

We’re a team of four designers from China, all graduates of ArtCenter College of Design. While we share similar roots, each of us brings a unique design background—from environmental and visual design to interaction and strategy. Our diverse perspectives enable us to approach challenges from multiple angles, blending empathy, culture, and systems thinking into our work.

We’re united by a shared belief: design can be a powerful tool for fostering connection—between people, communities, and the environments they inhabit. This belief led to the creation of Choy, a project born from our curiosity about how design can help people feel more rooted in place and culture, especially in urban spaces where those ties often fade.

This recognition is incredibly meaningful—it’s not just a celebration of design, but also of community, sustainability, and cultural identity. Choy started as a small idea rooted in shared memories of homegrown vegetables and the warmth of neighborhood ties.

Being honored by the NY Product Design Awards validates the emotional and social values behind the project. It tells me that human-centered, culturally sensitive design has a place in shaping future cities.

This recognition validated not just the outcome of our work, but the values and process behind it—how we collaborated, challenged one another, and stayed grounded in community needs. It reminded us that it’s possible to do work that is both conceptually ambitious and personally meaningful.

In terms of our careers, it gave each of us a stronger sense of direction. It reinforced that the kind of design we want to do—work that bridges culture, sustainability, and systems thinking—does resonate with others. And for our team, it strengthened our trust in each other and our approach, encouraging us to keep exploring, questioning, and growing together.

Experimentation has been a foundational part of our creative process. In the early stages of Choy, we explored a wide range of approaches to community interaction. One particularly speculative experiment involved designing social media profiles for plants, complete with chatbots that embodied distinct personalities. The idea was to give plants a "voice" and make their presence more relatable in digital spaces.

However, as the project evolved, we found ourselves returning to the core of the problem: not how to humanize plants, but how to create meaningful experiences for people through their interaction with plants and each other. This shift redirected our focus toward user experience, specifically how gardening could become a medium for casual, inclusive, and culturally rooted social engagement. Each experiment, even the more whimsical ones, brought us closer to that goal.

One key inspiration for Choy came from a familiar yet often overlooked practice in Chinese households—growing vegetables at home. Whether it's scallions in a jar or chili plants on a balcony, this everyday habit reflects care, resourcefulness, and a quiet form of self-sufficiency.

Building on this, we were drawn to the communal spirit of community farms. We wanted to reimagine this experience as a more lightweight, shareable, and socially engaging activity in urban settings—something that encourages people to step outside, connect with others, and find joy in small acts of planting together.

In projects like Choy, design is not just about solving problems—it’s a way to revisit traditional practices and translate them into forms that resonate with contemporary life. We believe good design grows from careful observation and cultural continuity. It is rooted in everyday experience, and at its best, it offers people new ways to reconnect—with each other, with their environment, and with inherited wisdom that still holds value today.

For Choy, our "clients" were our future users—Hosts, Gardeners, and the community. We navigated this balance through a user-centric process. "Client expectations" were represented by the actual needs and desires of our users, which we uncovered through research.

We continuously checked whether our design decisions aligned with these needs. When we deeply understood the "expectations"—the underlying needs and challenges of our community—our ideas naturally evolved to meet those needs authentically. Our diverse team backgrounds also played a crucial role; we examined the balance from different perspectives, ensuring that the final design met both the vision and the users' needs.

The first challenge we faced was balancing the needs of hosts and gardeners. They have different motivations and concerns—space/time versus access/guidance. Designing a platform that served both equally was key. We used various user personas derived from our research to continuously evaluate features from both viewpoints.

Another challenge was creating a seamless integration. We wanted the smart sensor and app to empower users, not overwhelm them. We overcame this by focusing on one key sensor and designing the app and watch extension for clear, step-by-step guidance, integrating it naturally into the user's routine.

We found that creative blocks often occurred when we got too focused on the “how” and lost sight of the “why.” When we got stuck, we recharged by revisiting the “why.” We’d revisit our research—the stories people shared about wanting a taste of home, the observations of underused urban spaces, the desire for connection.

Sometimes, simply talking to potential users or even engaging in gardening helped reignite the spark. Ultimately, for Choy, creativity was recharged by reconnecting with people, nature, and the cultural roots that inspired the project in the first place.

Growing up in densely populated cities in China, we witnessed how limited space didn’t limit people’s creativity in cultivating relationships—both with one another and with the land. From scallions growing in recycled bottles to spontaneous markets in alleys, these gestures reflect something deeper: a cultural appreciation for freshness, seasonality, and the quiet rituals of food.

In our culture, fresh food isn’t just nourishment—it’s an offering, a memory, a way of caring. This realization helped us see that food can be a medium for connection. In Choy, we aimed to design not just a gardening platform but a system where food becomes a relational thread—linking people across generations, habits, and places. We value this deeply: design that reconnects people with one another and the world around them.

To us, success as designers means truly connecting with users and offering them the best possible experience—not just visually or functionally, but emotionally and culturally.

In Choy, we spent a lot of time walking through neighborhoods, talking to a variety of residents—retirees, young families, newcomers—just to understand their everyday habits, needs, and what community meant to them. That experience reminded us that good design starts with empathy and trust.

Our advice is this: go beyond the screen. Talk to people. Observe their routines. Success comes when your work becomes something that feels natural and meaningful in someone’s life.

We would love to collaborate with Oki Sato from nendo. We've always admired how his work begins with human behavior—not just usability, but also the small emotional moments we often overlook. His designs seamlessly combine unexpected concepts in subtle, almost magical ways, and the soft, approachable curves in his products make them feel truly human.

In Choy, we also aimed to design from lived experience—how people interact with food, neighbors, and space. We believe that working with someone like Sato would be a chance to explore how playfulness and depth can coexist in design, and how even simple objects or systems can spark connection.

We wish more people would ask, “Why doesn’t your app support more chatting or online interaction?”

Our answer is intentional: we designed a lightweight social system that encourages just enough coordination to bring people together—but not enough to replace real interaction. We believe meaningful connections don’t happen through endless messages or emojis. They happen in real life—while watering plants together, sharing seeds, or exchanging tips face-to-face.

Choy isn’t trying to be another social network. It’s a quiet nudge to step outside, slow down, and rediscover the joy of presence.