Technology as Medium, Empathy from the East

Chinese-American designer Yuyin Sun brings JourneyLink to the Louvre

当地时间 4 月 12 日，第 37 届 ART SHOPPING 巴黎卢浮宫当代国际艺术博览会落下帷幕，由北京清野艺术、北京坤舆九域国际艺术联合呈现的「非遗遇见巴黎·东方艺术特展」圆满收官。旧金山华裔设计师、国际设计大奖得主孙雨音(Yuyin Sun)以个人身份携数字交互作品《我们之间的距离》(The Miles Between Us，基于其与团队共同开发的 JourneyLink 系统)重磅亮相，以江南园林哲思为底，融 AI 科技于形，在卢浮宫卡鲁塞尔厅的世界艺术舞台，演绎东方人文与前沿科技的共生之美，成为本届展会极具辨识度的东方设计力量。

On April 12 local time, the 37th edition of ART SHOPPING — the Contemporary International Art Fair at the Louvre Carrousel in Paris — drew to a close. The special exhibition “Intangible Heritage Meets Paris: Eastern Art,” jointly presented by Beijing Qingye Art and Beijing Kunyu Jiuyu International Art, concluded its run. San Francisco–based Chinese-American designer Yuyin Sun, a winner of multiple international design awards, exhibited individually with the digital interaction work The Miles Between Us — based on JourneyLink, a system she co-developed with her team. Grounded in the philosophy of Jiangnan classical gardens and brought to life through AI technology, the work was shown at the Carrousel du Louvre, where it offered a distinctive expression of Eastern humanism in dialogue with advanced technology, emerging as one of the most recognizable Eastern design voices of the fair.

跨界破界:从江南园林到数字交互的设计溯源

Crossing Disciplines: From Jiangnan Gardens to Digital Interaction

作为全球最具影响力的艺术盛事之一，本届 ART SHOPPING 汇聚全球 50 多个国家、超千位艺术家的作品，古典艺术与当代创新在此碰撞共生。孙雨音的作品跳出传统艺术载体，以车载交互界面为创作媒介，将东方美学底蕴与 AI 科技深度相融，独树一帜的表达引发国际艺术界广泛关注。

As one of the most influential art events in the world, this edition of ART SHOPPING brought together work from more than 1,000 artists across over 50 countries — a meeting of classical art and contemporary innovation. Sun’s work moved beyond traditional artistic media, taking the in-vehicle interface itself as her creative medium and weaving Eastern aesthetics together with AI technology. Her singular approach drew sustained attention from the international art community.

这份独特的设计基因，深深植根于她的故乡——江南苏州。园林“移步换景、曲径通幽”的意境，塑造了她“美在过程，暖于陪伴”的创作初心。从弗吉尼亚大学景观建筑专业深造，到跻身全球顶尖建筑事务所 SOM，再到参与麦加圣城百万级朝圣公共空间规划，孙雨音在宏大物理空间设计中，始终坚守“系统理性”与“人文感性”的双重内核——设计既要承载秩序与效率，更要传递精神与情感。

This design instinct is rooted in her hometown of Suzhou, in the Jiangnan region of China. The classical gardens there — with their layered scenes and winding paths that unfold one view at a time — shaped her conviction that beauty lives in the journey, and that warmth comes from being present with another. From a master’s in Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), where she contributed to the planning of public spaces in Mecca serving millions of pilgrims, Sun has consistently held to a dual core in her work: systemic rationality and human sensibility. Design must carry order and efficiency, but it must also carry spirit and feeling.

这份坚守推动她完成从物理景观到数字交互的跨界突破。如今作为 YC（S25）孵化的初创公司 Reacher 设计总监(Director of Design)，孙雨音深耕 AI 与人机协作领域，其设计作品累计斩获红点奖、A' Design Award 金奖、IDA 国际设计奖金奖、伦敦设计奖金奖等多项国际重磅奖项，成为活跃于全球设计舞台的华裔设计力量。

That conviction carried her across disciplines, from physical landscape to digital interaction. As Director of Design at Reacher, a Y Combinator (S25) startup, Sun now works deeply in AI and human-machine collaboration. Her design work has cumulatively received multiple major international design awards, including the Red Dot Award, A’ Design Award Gold, IDA International Design Awards Gold, and London Design Awards Gold, establishing her as a Chinese-American designer actively shaping the global design conversation.

科技共情:JourneyLink 以东方智慧破解现代孤独

Technology with Empathy: JourneyLink and the Modern Solitude

针对现代出行“关上车门，即是孤岛”的集体孤独，孙雨音与合作者 Yan Zeng、Ruifeng Wang 共同打造 AI 驱动车载交互系统 JourneyLink，以东方设计智慧重构旅途连接方式，让科技成为弥合情感隔阂的桥梁。

In response to the quiet isolation of modern travel — the moment a car door closes and each person becomes an island — Sun, together with her collaborators Yan Zeng and Ruifeng Wang, developed JourneyLink, an AI-driven in-vehicle interaction system. Drawing on Eastern design sensibilities, the project reimagines how connection is sustained on the road, treating technology as a bridge across emotional distance rather than a source of it.

JourneyLink 三大核心功能尽显人文温度:智能耦合，AI 实时感应车队动态，温和引导成员归队，守护同行默契；情感留存，过滤信息冗余，精准捕捉旅途高光，珍藏专属美好；安全连接，轻量化语音交互，让陪伴不分心，让温暖更安心。

Three core capabilities express the system’s humanist intent. Intelligent Coupling: AI senses the dynamics of a traveling group in real time and gently guides members back when they fall out of sync. Emotional Memory: the system filters out informational clutter and surfaces the meaningful moments of a trip, preserving them as a private record. Safe Connection: a lightweight voice interaction layer allows companionship to remain present without pulling attention away from the road.

此次特展上，孙雨音重点呈现 JourneyLink “旅程总结界面”：870 英里征程、5 座跨越城市、44 次欢笑、21 处印记，冰冷数据被转化为有温度的情感契约。观展嘉宾驻足体验，纷纷感慨：“这不是简单的交互设计，而是用科技书写的陪伴诗篇，东方‘和而不同’的哲思在此尽显无遗。”

For this exhibition, Sun chose to focus on JourneyLink’s trip-summary interface: 870 miles traveled, 5 cities crossed, 44 shared laughs, 21 stops left behind. What might otherwise read as cold data is reframed as an emotional record of being with someone. Visitors lingered with the piece. As one observer put it, “This isn’t simply interaction design — it’s a kind of poetry of companionship written through technology. The Eastern idea of harmony through difference is fully present here.”

AI 时代的人文设计:以系统智能重写陪伴的语言

Designing Humanity in the Age of AI: Rewriting the Language of Companionship through System Intelligence

JourneyLink 并非传统意义上的 UI 设计，而是一套面向“群体出行”场景的多智能体协作系统。系统底层融合实时情境感知(real-time context awareness)、群体动态建模(group dynamics modeling)与意图预测(intent prediction)三层架构，由 AI 持续解析车队的行驶节奏、位置关系与互动信号，识别“队伍正在自然散开”与“有人正在掉队”这两种语义差异——前者无需干预，后者才轻声提示。在信息处理层，系统通过事件显著性筛选(event saliency filtering)从持续涌入的旅程数据中提取真正“值得被记住的时刻”，让记忆不被冗余淹没。而轻量化语音交互层(low-cognitive-load voice interface)将驾驶员认知负荷降至最低，让陪伴成为环境的一部分，而非注意力的争夺者。

JourneyLink is not interface design in the conventional sense, but a multi-agent collaborative system built for the shared-travel context. Its architecture rests on three layers — real-time context awareness, group dynamics modeling, and intent prediction — through which the AI continuously interprets the rhythm, spatial relationships, and interaction signals of a traveling group. It distinguishes between two semantically distinct states: a group naturally drifting apart, which requires no intervention, and someone genuinely falling behind, which calls for a gentle prompt. At the information layer, event saliency filtering surfaces moments truly worth remembering from the steady stream of trip data, so that memory is not buried in noise. A low-cognitive-load voice interaction layer keeps driver attention free, allowing companionship to become part of the ambient environment rather than something that competes for focus.

支撑这套系统的，是孙雨音长期思考的一组设计命题:当 AI 拥有越来越多感知能力，它该感知什么、又该克制什么？她将这套方法论称为“减法智能”(subtractive intelligence)——AI 真正的进步，不在于能输出多少信息，而在于知道何时保持沉默。JourneyLink 的每一个 AI 决策点，都内嵌一个“是否值得打扰”的判断阈值；系统对话的节奏，参考了东方语境中“留白”的美学逻辑——克制本身，是一种关怀。这种设计哲学，让算法不再是冷峻的优化器，而成为一个懂得分寸的同行者。

Underpinning the system is a set of design questions Sun has been working through for some time: as AI gains ever more capacity to perceive, what should it perceive — and what should it withhold? She calls this methodology

subtractive intelligence. Real progress in AI lies not in how much it can output, but in knowing when to stay quiet. Every AI decision point in JourneyLink carries an embedded threshold of “is this worth interrupting for”; the cadence of system dialogue draws on the Eastern aesthetic of negative space, where restraint itself is a form of care. This design philosophy reframes the algorithm — no longer a cold optimizer, but a traveling companion that knows how to keep the right distance.

在巴黎卢浮宫卡鲁塞尔厅，这套以 AI 为骨、以人文为心的系统首次走入国际艺术语境。来自全球的观展者驻足于“旅程总结界面”前——他们看到的不只是数据可视化，而是一个 AI 系统对“陪伴”这件最古老的人类经验的当代回答。本届特展虽已落幕，但孙雨音的探索仍在继续:她以工程师的严谨构建系统，以设计师的敏感校准分寸，在 AI 加速狂奔的时代，坚持让技术回到人的尺度——这或许正是新一代华裔设计师面向世界时，最具说服力的回答。

At the Carrousel du Louvre, this system — engineered in AI, grounded in humanism — entered the international art conversation for the first time. Visitors from around the world paused before the trip-summary interface, where what they encountered was not simply data visualization, but an AI system’s contemporary response to one of the oldest human experiences: being with another. The exhibition has closed, but Sun’s inquiry continues. She builds systems with an engineer’s rigor and calibrates them with a designer’s sensitivity, insisting — in an age of accelerating AI — that technology return to the human scale. This, perhaps, is the most compelling answer a new generation of Chinese-American designers can offer the world.