Relationship-focused design is a research and design proposal which Yin started from 2012, and have been directing Yin’s practice since. Relationship-focused design encompasses three research brancheswhich tackles design’s relationship with technology (medium), with(post-)colonialism, and with art, respectively. The three branches converge at the over-all analysis about the entanglements between design and capitalism. Which lead to the proposal to transit design practice from mass communication to focusing on interpersonal relationship.In 2011, Yin moved to the Netherlands for her master degree. As someone who leave China for the first time in her life, she had difficulties in English and participating the discourses. As a result, she was often chewing the classroom discussions in the classroom for days, and then respond to her fellow students at once in the final presentation, through performance or installations. While enjoying the nuanced skills for internal communication that she’s learning from, she was asked to do something that can communicate to a wider audience, as she was graduating.The reasonable ask prompt her to reflect on the nature of design, why and how it always demands recognition from the mass, and what does it mean if design can be practiced on a personal scale — and how. This opened a long-term research for Yin. In 2013, she wrote her first thesis“Design for a Known Audience: How Design can Formulate a New Social Structure” to articulate her points, and created a performanceinstallation which offer a visceral experience of the theory.

Relationship-focused design is a research and design proposal which Yin started from 2012, and have been directing Yin’s practice since. Relationship-focused design encompasses three research brancheswhich tackles design’s relationship with technology (medium), with(post-)colonialism, and with art, respectively. The three branches converge at the over-all analysis about the entanglements between design and capitalism. Which lead to the proposal to transit design practice from mass communication to focusing on interpersonal relationship.In 2011, Yin moved to the Netherlands for her master degree. As someone who leave China for the first time in her life, she had difficulties in English and participating the discourses. As a result, she was often chewing the classroom discussions in the classroom for days, and then respond to her fellow students at once in the final presentation, through performance or installations. While enjoying the nuanced skills for internal communication that she’s learning from, she was asked to do something that can communicate to a wider audience, as she was graduating.The reasonable ask prompt her to reflect on the nature of design, why and how it always demands recognition from the mass, and what does it mean if design can be practiced on a personal scale — and how. This opened a long-term research for Yin. In 2013, she wrote her first thesis“Design for a Known Audience: How Design can Formulate a New Social Structure” to articulate her points, and created a performanceinstallation which offer a visceral experience of the theory.

Although the intrinsic immateriality of the digital realm is by nature opposed to the tangible society we live in, its architecture has been designed and shaped by humans and comes with direct consequences in user’s lives and behavioural patterns. For years, the digital space has been the topic of numerous papers and studies; to Yin Aiwen, it is now time to work on a new school of thought that would be the foundation of a wider societal reflexion on the Digital, through the discipline of ‘Cyber-urbanism’.

The fabrication of cyberspace is no longer an 8-bit render of the physical world, but has become its own universe. By agglutinating our attention onto their products, a few corporations puppeteer our everyday life and mind space. Their private interests grind over the traditional institutional power while claiming they have always been the David against the Goliath. The users – the labor, the product, the consumer and the subject of surveillance – don’t even have a seat at the table.

Activists implore users to be mindful in their everyday encounter with the digital and to practice privacy in an almost ritualistic way. Protest becomes a zero-sum game between accepting terms of service or deleting accounts. It is a futile attempt to get to the bottom of the code and terms of services, or to condemn one software after another. The only thing we have left to do is to threaten to leave. But when the digital becomes the everyday infrastructure, these actions trade our right to live socially for the hope that we can preserve our right to privacy.

Silicon Valley’s user experience design (UX) always assumes the user is alone with the product. It is a thinking tool that pre-programs users as isolated laborers who are unable to unite, even if the companies always claim that they help you to connect. Yet it is also the same thinking tool that designs a product that is meant to accommodate daily activities at the scale of a mega-metropolis. Imagine how repressive that urban life would be.