Yue "Yola" Wu uses visual thinking and collaborative workshops to explore how design can support human decision-making. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
For Chinese product designer Yue "Yola" Wu, artificial intelligence is not only a tool for faster outcomes, but also a tool to turn career exploration into a form of self-discovery.
She thinks AI can be a medium for helping people see themselves more clearly — what they care about, how they make decisions and what futures they are able to imagine.
"I'm interested in how AI can reveal human intention, not just automate tasks," Wu said.
This perspective is central to Future Fizz, an AI-powered career exploration experience designed to help young people imagine future roles beyond conventional job titles.
"AI is often described as a technology of automation," Wu said. "But I think it can also become a technology of reflection. It can help people notice what they care about, understand why they choose one direction over another, and imagine futures they may not have been able to name yet."
While career development can be filled with pressure, especially for young people asked to make decisions about an uncertain future, Wu saw a design opportunity in that uncertainty: using AI — itself a rapidly evolving medium — to help people prepare for futures that are also undefined.
Future Fizz does not begin with a fixed career recommendation. Instead, it looks at the small signals people leave behind — their interests, passions, skills, curiosities, and everyday preferences — and uses AI to remix those signals into fictional future roles. These roles are not meant to predict a user's future; they are designed to make possible futures feel more open, playful, and discussable.
Through AI-generated fictional careers, transferable skills, and future scenarios, the experience turns career exploration into a form of self-discovery. A user might not know how to describe what they want to become, but they may recognize that they have an unusual combination of interests.
Future Fizz uses AI-generated fictional careers and future scenarios to help young people externalize interests, skills, and possible identities. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
"In Future Fizz, the goal is not to tell people what they should become," Wu said. "It is to help them see more possibilities in who they already are."
She studied industrial design and interaction design at Shanghai Jiao Tong University before earning a Master of Design from the University of California, Berkeley.
Future Fizz won a 2026 Red Dot Award in Interaction, UI and User Experience. The project also received the Professional Winner honor in Apps and Platforms at the 2026 Core77 Design Awards, where each main category names a single Professional Winner.
The two awards brought broader visibility to a project that uses AI not to narrow choices, but to make future possibilities easier for young people to explore.
The same question appears in a different form in Wu's enterprise product design work. As a product designer at Everpure, Wu designs data-informed experiences that support complex infrastructure solution decision-making. In these contexts, decisions can be high-stakes, technical, multi-dimensional. and business-critical.
Enterprise users often need to evaluate customer needs, technical constraints, business priorities, implementation trade-offs, and uncertainty at the same time. The challenge is not only to move faster, but to understand what criteria matter, where trade-offs exist, and why one path may be more appropriate than another.
A conceptual interface study by Wu explores how AI can make decision criteria, constraints, and trade-offs more visible in complex product experiences. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
Wu also applies this thinking to her own design process, using AI as a co-brainstorming partner during early concept development. Instead of asking AI to produce a final solution, she uses it to expand the possibility space, surface tensions, test metaphors, and compare directions before converging.
Her work has received international recognition from design awards including the Red Dot Design Award, Core77 Design Awards, UX Design Awards, French Design Awards, NY Digital Awards, London Design Awards, and Interaction Awards.
Please contact the writer at hanjingyan@chinadaily.com.cn
