Designing Encounters That Stay With You: The Work of Shih-Hsueh Wang

Interaction design has a habit of orbiting around its tools — the screen that reacts, the headset that immerses, the sensor that promises a new kind of magic. Shih-Hsueh Wang has always been more interested in what happens before the interface. For him, interaction begins with people: how they inhabit a space, communicate with one another, and create meaning through movement long before technology asserts itself.

That perspective took shape during his graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where he built a project that blurred the line between prototyping and performance.

Turning Models Into Something You Can Walk Through

Wang’s thesis, STAGES OF CONVERGENCE (2023), was not only research on collaborative design — it was a functioning environment that pulled participants directly into the act of creation. Using motion sensors, projection, and real-time video, he developed a platform that translated tabletop models into full-scale spatial scenes. Participants stepped into these shifting environments, tested ideas with their bodies, reacted to forms as they changed, and collectively shaped the space.

Through workshops and user tests, a pattern became clear. When people are invited to act rather than simply talk, collaboration opens up. Ideas circulate faster, questions surface earlier, and new possibilities emerge from movement itself. Wang was more interested in how physical action helps people imagine together than in the spectacle of technology.

One participant creates a scene using LEGO blocks on the tabletop, under a streaming camera, while another participant acts within the projected scene and provides feedback with a customized spatial drawing tool. Courtesy of Shih-Hsueh Wang.

A Concept Built on Balance

That sensitivity to movement carried into his conceptual work. In 2021, Island of Rain received a Good Idea Award at the Taipei New Horizon Creative Festival. The digitally published concept showed five seesaws arranged beneath a halo of mist. When pairs of visitors found equilibrium, vapor would gather overhead — a small atmospheric acknowledgment of cooperation.

Even unbuilt, the project distilled interaction down to its essentials: bodies adjusting to one another, and meaning emerging through motion. It echoed the same line of inquiry that drove his thesis — that shared action can communicate ideas more directly than any interface.

Reframing Heritage Through a Night Out

For the Taipei National Palace Museum Online Curator Competition in 2020, Wang approached storytelling through a different lens. Working with a collaborator who led the research and curation, he designed the film for Time-Travel through Taipei National Palace by Bar Hopping, which received the competition’s Special Award.

The project reimagined ancient drinking culture through the familiar rhythm of bar hopping. Each stop in the digital sequence introduced artifacts and historical rituals in a tone closer to nightlife than to traditional museum interpretation. Wang’s film set up that shift — playful, contemporary, but still grounded in research — and helped the project draw viewers into history through a social script they already understood.

A Forum That Makes Resilience Tangible

Later that year, Wang served as lead designer (exhibit and website design) for the 2020 International Forum for Architecture Thesis Design in Taiwan & Southeast Asia, held at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan. The theme — New Resilient Grounds — demanded an environment that could speak to adaptability without feeling heavy-handed. His response was a modular installation built from honeycomb cardboard, a material chosen as much for its metaphorical value as for its practicality.

As Cheng-Luen Hsueh, Chair of Architecture at NCKU, recalls,

“It’s uncommon for one designer to lead both the physical exhibition and its digital counterpart. Wang’s ability to think seamlessly across media was evident from the start.”

The honeycomb structure stood as a quiet expression of resilience: lightweight yet strong, economical yet spatially rich, and adaptable to the forum’s needs. It housed exhibitions, accommodated on-site presentations, and supported remote participation, all while maintaining the openness necessary for conversation. Rather than presenting resilience as a fixed idea, the installation embodied it through its flexibility and impermanence.

Wang and his team celebrated the success of the New Resilient Grounds exhibition and forum. Courtesy of Shih-Hsueh Wang.

Carrying the Thread Forward

Today, Wang brings these ideas into his work as a User Experience Designer at G&A Strategy and Design, creating interactive environments for museums across the United States. His practice continues to foreground human behavior — not as a metric or a persona, but as the material that gives a project its emotional shape.

Colleagues often note the same quality in his work: interfaces that feel more like invitations than instructions. It’s a sensibility that connects his academic research, conceptual installations, and built environments into a coherent lineage.

How He Sees It

If there is a principle running through Wang’s projects, it is this: Interaction is shaped by people long before it is shaped by technology.

Tools can support the experience, but they don’t determine its meaning. That emerges from motion — the shift of weight on a seesaw, the flow of a group moving through space, the shared curiosity that forms between participants.

Wang designs for those moments. Everything else helps them surface.