Official photo of Ziren Zhou, also known as Steven Zhou, with a light gray background, wearing a black jacket, glasses, and smiling at the camera.

About

Ziren Zhou (周子韧) is a Designer, Researcher, and Technologist working in the intersection of consumer product design and technology innovation. His work explores new design opportunities beyond the limit of current solutions and brings user experience innovation to our daily scenarios.


Experience

HMI Experience Product Manager - IM Motors

Nov 20270 - Present Ӏ Shanghai, China

Creating Something Cool inside Cars;

IMOS Multiscreen HMI operation system.

Hybrid Designer & Team Lead - XiaoLab

Nov 2017 - Jun 2020 Ӏ Changsha, China

Cooperate with developers as a hybrid designer, in combination with industrial design, user experience design and service system design, finding innovation scheme and coming out with patents for invention. Designing both physical and digital products, evaluate and iterate with 3D printing, realistic renderings, Arduino, XD, ProtoPie and Figma. Responsible for defining ux framework and design language of Unity based AR Game Maxism Go, WeChat mini program Ofuda and the update version of Harvard CBDB data visualization.

Interdisciplinary Designer - Microsoft Summer Camp

Jun 2019 - Jul 2019 Ӏ Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group, Beijing, China

Team up with programmers at hackathon so as to develop integrated solution for Nocturia tracking and fall detection. Sharing interdisciplinary collaboration outcomes between programmers and designers at Hunan University to staff at Microsoft Research Asia.

HMI & UX Designer - Baidu Apollo Autopilot Project

Oct 2018 - Jan 2019 Ӏ Changsha, China

Created storyboards and personas as per users, and incorporated them into design decisions, resulting in a Multi-channel user interface and user experience design creation for particular scenarios for passengers. Participate in UX research for Baidu Smart Cars HCI Design Trends.

Design Technologist - Georgia Tech Robotic Imperfection 

Nov 2018 - Jan 2019 Ӏ Changsha, China

Cooperate as a multi-skilled designer, develope high fidelity working prototype for both software and physical robots using Arduino SCM. Develop a code-free hardware prototype solution that linked Apps to Hardware using XD - ProtoPie - Android - Arduino workflow.

Designer Intern - Pei Rui Culture Communication Co., Ltd.

May 2017 - Nov 2017 Ӏ Changsha, China

Participate in new product planning and market & user research. Leading group project about future EV charging system design. Evaluate feasibility of design ideas, based on multiple factors such as appearance, production costs & methods, and market characteristics.


Education

Imperial College London & Royal College of Art

QS No.8 in All / QS No.1 in Art & Design

M.A. & M.Sc. Innovation Design Engineering ( Quit studying due to Covid-19 )

Hunan University

985 / 211 / Double-First Class University

B.S. Industrial Design Outstanding Graduate 2020 Core Courses GPA 3.74 ( Top 15% )


Award & Honor

Contemporary Good Design Glod Award - Xiamen Red Dot Museum, 2022

Goldreed Industrial Design Award - XiongAn, Hebei, 2021

Design Shanghai - Shanghai exhibition, 2021

Grand Prize at China Universities Industrial Design Competition - 2021

Dubai Global Grad Show - 2020 Cleaning a waste-filled planet, GGS

Core77 Design Award - Design for Social Impact, Student Notable, Core77.com, 2020

Gold Pin Design Award - Concept Design, Taiwan Design Research Institute, 2020

Excellent Club Leader - Microsoft Student Club, Microsoft Research Asia, 2018

First Prize of Central China Hackathon - Microsoft Research Asia, 2018

Microsoft Great Maker Award - Group Leader, Microsoft Research Asia, 2018

The Chinese Design Award - Nominee Prize of Product, 2017

International Virtual Reality Technology and Application Innovation Contest - Third Prize, IVRTC, 2018


Patent & Publication

Patents for Invention

  1. CN116185184A User characteristic-based personalized control component control method and device

  2. CN115809492A Intelligent drawing system and method for automobile clothes or paint

  3. CN115686709A Application level display method, electronic equipment and storage medium

  4. CN115359766B Display method and device based on vehicle behaviors

  5. CN115268662A Vehicle-mounted cabin screen auxiliary input method and device

  6. CN115268819A In-vehicle multimedia sound zone switching method and device, vehicle and storage medium

  7. CN114584839A Clipping method and device for shooting vehicle-mounted video, electronic equipment and storage medium

  8. CN114697075A Resource allocation method and device, server and storage medium

  9. CN114598359A Vehicle-mounted NFC connection control system and method for controlling automobile through NFC connection

  10. CN114030355A Vehicle control method and device, vehicle and medium

  11. CN114003154A Control method and device for automobile display window and automobile

  12. CN113377267B Brightness regulating method and device for multiple illumination light sources and storage medium

  13. CN307107962S Display screen panel with toggle dashboard graphical user interface

  14. CN307107964S Display screen panel with dashboard editing graphical user interface

  15. CN307019242S Display screen panel with dashboard sorting graphical user interface

  16. CN113320448B Seat adjusting method and device and computer readable storage medium

  17. CN111915683B Image position calibration method, intelligent device and storage medium

  18. CN111012359A Tumble detection method, tumble detection device and storage medium

Conference:

  • HCI International 2020 - A Usability Study of a Brother Printer and Improvement with Ergonomic Recommendations.  

  • TEDx HSANNU - The 3rd Generation of Smart Home and IoT 

Journal

  • Design, User Experience, and Usability - A Usability Study of a Brother Printer and Improvement with Ergonomic Recommendations.


Skills & Abilities

Industrial Design

User Experience Design & Research

Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Material Exploration

Innovation Strategy

Service Design

System Design

Functional Design

Usability Testing

Photography - Canon, DJI, GoPro, iPhone, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Lightroom.

Video Editing - Final Cut Pro, Compressor, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Media Encoder

Rendering - Keyshot 9, Keyshot XR, Physically based rendering (PBR)

3D CAD Modeling - Solidworks, Autodesk Fusion 360, T-Splines, Rhinoceros

PM Tools - Mindnode, Xmind, Axure, Omni Plan

User Interface Design - Adobe XD, Sketch, Mockplus

On-screen Interaction Design - ProtoPie, Principle, Apple Reality Compressor ( ARkit )

Off-screen Interaction Design - Microsoft Kinect, Arduino SCM, ESP8266

Web Development - p5.js, Hype 5, Github Pages, Wordpress, Squarespace

Branding & Typography Design - Adobe Illustrator, Adobe inDesign

Office Suits - Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Word, Excel, Powerpoint

Productivity - Alfred, Paste, Markdown