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.