In an era when design, technology and culture are rapidly converging, experiential designer and art director Chen Si has emerged as a creative force redefining how people experience the built world. 

A winner of both Gold and Silver honors at the 2025 MUSE Design Awards, a global design competition that honors global excellence in architecture, interior, product, fashion and landscape design, Chen’s multidisciplinary practice bridges landscape architecture, storytelling, and digital innovation. Her work ranges from transforming global hospitality environments at a world-leading landscape and environmental design firm to pioneering AI-assisted visualization research and creating interactive exhibitions across New York City, Berlin and beyond. 

Chen’s approach, which she calls “phy-gital storytelling,” connects the sensory and the emotional—blending light, data and narrative to craft experiences that feel deeply human in an increasingly technological age.  

Through her synthesis of environmental artistry, emerging technology and human empathy, Chen has managed to carve out a space that is uniquely her own. 

Her work stands as evidence that design can be both intelligent and intimate — a bridge between the tangible and the transcendent. 

By merging experiential design with cross-cultural storytelling and AI-driven exploration, she is defining a new creative paradigm where innovation begins and ends—with human connection. 

Here is the full interview with Chen: 

Your background in landscape architecture seems to inform everything you do. How does it shape your work today? 

Landscape architecture taught me to think like an ecologist — to see design as a living system that balances environment, movement and emotion. 

That training gave me a mindset rare in the digital world: I approach even immersive installations as ecosystems of light, texture and rhythm, not isolated visuals. 

When I moved into experiential and brand design, that background helped me build spaces that “breathe"—environments that respond to people as naturally as landscapes do. 

It’s what differentiates my work today: my projects carry the rigor of architecture, the curiosity of art and the sensory empathy of nature. 

What impact did working at a world-leading landscape and environmental design firm have on your creative trajectory? 

That experience profoundly shaped how I merge innovation with storytelling. 

During my three and a half years there, I worked on international projects like Siranna, a luxury escape in northwest Saudi Arabia, and Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Sioux City, Iowa, the United States, where I learned how large-scale environments can carry emotional narratives. 

Beyond design, I also led exploration in AI visualization and real-time rendering, helping to integrate digital workflows that are now used globally within the firm. 

That role grounded my reputation as a designer who moves fluidly between conceptual artistry and technical precision — someone who can envision, visualize and communicate complex ideas through both human and technological lenses. 

It taught me that leadership in design is not only about form but also about transforming how teams imagine and create. 

Your MUSE Gold project “Ten out of Ten” received international recognition. What does it actually reveal about your approach? 

It reflects my passion for cross-cultural storytelling and emotional design. 

The project reimagined a Chinese food-tasting event for a Thai audience, using what I developed as a Cross-Cultural Adaptation Framework — translating heritage into shared experience through materials and symbolism. 

For example, traditional steaming baskets were replaced with Thai sticky-rice steamers, soy jars became fish-sauce urns and color systems were adapted to local visual codes. 

That approach isn’t about decoration—it’s about empathy as innovation. It shows that I don’t just design experiences; I design communication systems between cultures. To me, that’s how design can go beyond aesthetics and become a tool for understanding — a perspective that keeps my work both intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant. 

How do you merge physical and digital storytelling without losing emotional depth? 

I’m drawn to the threshold between the tangible and the virtual. In my installation artwork Touch at the Infinite Weave, a single hand reached through darkness, activating constellations of light—a poetic metaphor for connection in a digital age. 

The project was about vulnerability, empathy and the courage to initiate contact even when the world feels mediated by screens. 

That idea runs through my current and future work. 

As I wrote in my Future Plan, “Design can help us see ourselves more clearly—our place in history, our current moment and where we might be headed next.” 

This thinking guides my collaboration with Jerome Haferd Studio, an architecture firm that builds environment projects at the intersection of preservation and design, where we’re transforming the historic Amsterdam News Building in Harlem, New York City, into a cultural center that bridges preservation and innovation. 

By combining archival storytelling with interactive technology, we’re showing how design can connect past and future through lived human experience. 

It’s this belief—that digital design can deepen memory and meaning—that defines what I offer to the field. 

You’ve been recognized for integrating AI and visualization research into design practice. How is your method different from others using similar tools? 

Many designers use AI for speed or style. I use it for sensitivity. 

At the firm, I introduced AI and real-time rendering not as shortcuts, but as catalysts for imagination—helping teams visualize atmosphere, emotion, and sequence in ways traditional software couldn’t. 

My approach reframes technology as an emotional amplifier: a tool that helps us see how a space might feel before it’s built. 

That philosophy extends into my educational collaborations, where I guide students in combining AI and 3D printing to translate intangible feelings into form. 

I believe my distinct contribution to the field is showing how technology can serve artistry—preserving creative authorship in a time when design risks becoming automated. 

As I wrote in my Future Plan, “The biggest challenge is to stay human—to not let tools define us or make our work all look the same.” 

Your MUSE Silver-winning project “You Are the Canvas”  turns audiences into co-creators. Why is that important? 

Because participation transforms spectatorship into connection. At Fashion Week Brooklyn, New York City, I redesigned the runway as an interactive co-creation stage—hanging canvases captured audience doodles in real time, projecting them live and later turning them into wearable pieces. 

It proved that creativity can be collaborative, and sustainability can be social: every leftover canvas and fabric was repurposed into new installations. 

This project encapsulates what makes my work unique: I use technology not as spectacle but as invitation. 

Whether in a fashion show, public plaza or exhibition, I want people to feel that they’re part of the creative process—that design is not something you look at, but something you live inside. 

How do you define innovation within experiential design today? 

Innovation isn’t about new tools; it’s about new connections. For this year’s Eco2librium Climate Conference, I created interactive installations that changed with human proximity—turning data on sustainability into sensory storytelling. 

That’s what I mean by experiential innovation: blending logic and emotion so that complex information becomes intuitive and felt. 

My distinction in the field comes from that ability to merge disciplines—translating spatial strategy, environmental psychology and emerging tech into cohesive, poetic systems. I see myself as part designer, part translator—making abstract ideas tangible through atmosphere, movement and light. 

Your projects span continents. How do you maintain cultural authenticity while designing globally? 

Every culture carries its own rhythm, palette and ritual.My process begins with listening—to language, stories and sensory habits—and designing from what feels familiar, not foreign. Whether I’m working in Saudi Arabia, Thailand or New York, I aim to design with, not for, communities. 

That sensitivity has shaped my reputation for creating spaces that are both local and universal—places where people recognize themselves in the experience. 

Which experiential designer or artist inspires you most, and why? 

British artist and stage designer Es Devlin has always inspired me for how she turns ideas into immersive worlds that breathe. Her work proves that technology can be poetic—that light, motion and narrative can compose symphonies of emotion. But my own practice expands that conversation into the cultural and ecological realm. 

Like Devlin, I design for wonder, but I also design for connection: between cultures, between physical and digital, between technology and humanity. 

As I reflected in my Future Plan, I want to “keep creating from a place of independence and reflection—to show that there’s another way forward, one where technology, humanity and design grow together instead of apart.” 

That’s what makes my practice distinctive—I use emerging media not to escape the human condition, but to understand it more deeply.   

Looking ahead, what’s next in your creative journey? 

I’m focused on designing for consciousness. 

Upcoming collaborations with the Art Biennale in Berlin, Germany, as well as COPE NYC, IW Gallery and Jerome Haferd Studio in New York City will all see me continue my exploration of how spaces and visuals can evoke emotional awareness. 

Some projects examine how design preserves cultural memory; others explore wearable art as a new form of interactive storytelling. 

But the thread connecting everything is clear: I want design to remain human.If my early career was about mastering tools, this next chapter is about mastering meaning. I’m building bridges—between art and architecture, between intelligence and intuition—and proving that in an age of machines, emotional intelligence may be the most advanced design tool of all. 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon  

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