Where Time Touches Light: Yefan Liu and the Future of Cultural Design

As spring begins the opening chapter of 2025’s design award season, an exceptional narrative of innovation and cultural significance is commanding attention. This April, the prestigious Indigo Design Awards unveiled their newest winners. Among them, product designer Yefan Liu won an Indigo Award for her mixed-reality museum project, “The Mukden Palace Experience.” In itself, an Indigo honor carries global weight – the competition draws submissions from over 50 countries and is judged by an international panel of top creatives. But Liu’s achievement didn’t stop there. In the past year, The Mukden Palace Experience has also earned other major accolade, including: the International Design Awards (IDA), the DNA Paris Design Awards, the London Design Awards, and the New York Product Design Awards. This sweeping recognition across North America, Europe, and Asia has drawn wide attention to Liu’s work and what it represents.

These awards are among the design world’s most respected, and their collective praise signals the significance of Liu’s project. The IDA was created to celebrate smart, sustainable multidisciplinary design and to recognize visionary talent worldwide. It has since grown into one of the most respected design awards in the world, attracting entries across architecture, fashion, graphics, and product design. For The Mukden Palace Experience to impress the IDA’s seasoned jury is no small accomplishment. Likewise, at the DNA Paris Design Awards – an accolade honoring international designers who improve daily life through practical, beautiful and innovative work – Liu’s project stood out in a field of hundreds evaluated by a globally diverse panel. The London Design Awards, an international competition that in 2023 alone saw over 3,000 entries from more than 45 countries, also bestowed its honors on Mukden Palace Experience. And in New York, the project earned a win at the NY Product Design Awards, a program assembled to honor top product designers and teams from all over the world whose creations make daily living better through ingenious innovation. That one design could resonate with juries across all of these venues – each with its own cultural lens and criteria – speaks to a truly universal achievement.

So, what exactly is The Mukden Palace Experience? In essence, it’s a bold reimagining of how we engage with history. The project is a mixed-reality installation that transforms a visit to the Shenyang Imperial Palace (also known as Mukden Palace, a UNESCO-listed 17th-century royal complex) into an interactive journey. Donning an Apple Vision Pro headset or similar AR device, museum-goers are immersed in a digital layer superimposed on the real palace grounds. The interface invites them to “Start the Journey,” greeting users with visuals of ornate architecture and Chinese script, before allowing them to explore exhibits in unprecedented ways. Eye-tracking and hand gestures become the new vocabulary for exploration – a visitor might gaze at an ancient artifact and see contextual information blossom before their eyes, or point toward a hall to reveal an overlay of how it looked in a bygone era.

“With The Mukden Palace Experience, design meant reimagining how visitors engage with cultural heritage,” Liu says, describing the goal as an experience that “not only preserved the authenticity of historic artifacts but also made them accessible and intriguing for a modern audience.” In other words, it’s a bridge between centuries – a way to honor the past without confining it behind glass.

Creating such a bridge required a careful blend of technology and storytelling. Liu and her development team began with extensive research at the Shenyang Palace Museum, ensuring that every digital augmentation was historically accurate and respectful. Only then did they layer in cutting-edge tech. By using the latest AR hardware, they enabled intuitive interactions – the Apple Vision Pro headset, for example, tracks where your eyes move and what you gesture toward, letting visitors engage with the palace’s treasures in a deeply personal and dynamic way. A static display case becomes a portal: look at a ceremonial robe and you might see the emperor who wore it, rendered in 3D; reach toward a faded scroll and an animation might unfurl the story inscribed. All the while, the real artifact remains right in front of you.

The design challenge, of course, was walking the line between innovation and preservation. “The biggest challenge…was striking the right balance between preserving the authenticity of cultural artifacts and integrating cutting-edge interactive technology,” Liu reflects, noting that the goal was to enhance the visitor experience without compromising the integrity of the exhibits. Her solution was to let the artifacts lead the way – the technology exists to support and illuminate the museum pieces, not distract from them. Done right, the experience becomes an educational tool that feels like magic.

Suddenly, a younger generation raised on smartphones finds a palace museum as compelling as any video game. In fact, The Mukden Palace Experience is explicitly designed to make learning about history more engaging for a broad audience, “particularly to younger generations,” by turning a passive walkthrough into an active, game-like exploration. It’s a museum visit transformed into what Liu calls a “personal and meaningful” connection with the past.

If Mukden Palace is a triumph of immersive storytelling, it also reflects the unique background and philosophy of the designer behind it. Yefan Liu’s journey to this moment has been anything but ordinary. Born and educated in China before advancing her studies in the United States, Liu exemplifies the new breed of designer fluent in multiple disciplines and cultures. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Industrial Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), where she not only honed her craft but also helped teach it – serving as a 3D modeling instructor to younger students – an early sign of her knack for bridging ideas and audiences.

After graduation, by the time she joined iSpring Water Systems, a renowned U.S.-based consumer water filter company, Liu was ready to take on a leadership role in design. At iSpring, she has been spearheading visual design initiatives, translating engineering feats into compelling product imagery and user-friendly interfaces for e-commerce and social media. It’s a setting far from imperial palaces and AR spectacles, yet Liu approaches it with the same core mindset: empathetic, user-centered problem solving.

More of her work and design philosophy can be found at https://yefandesign.com/.

With major awards now under her belt for The Mukden Palace Experience, Yefan Liu stands at a promising inflection point in her career. She continues her role at iSpring, applying her creative vision to products that people use every day, and hints at expanding her mixed-reality storytelling into new cultural projects. Colleagues describe her as constantly exploring how emerging technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence can be harnessed to enrich human experiences – not replace them.

Liu herself believes the next decade of design will be defined by this synergy between tech and humanity. The integration of AI, she predicts, will “deepen” and greatly improve the efficiency of turning ideas into reality, freeing designers to focus on creativity and strategy. At the same time, she sees sustainable design becoming not the exception but the rule, with more emphasis on eco-friendly materials and designs that raise environmental awareness. “Overall, the design industry will move toward greater intelligence, sustainability, and human-centered approaches,” Liu says of the coming years – a future she is preparing to meet head-on with her characteristic mix of curiosity and purpose.

Even as she looks forward, Liu remains deeply interested in the power of the past. Fresh off the success of Mukden Palace, she is already considering how its approach might be applied to other cultural heritage sites or museums around the world. There is a sense that this project – initially a student concept borne out of SCAD’s interdisciplinary ethos – could scale up to benefit institutions globally, especially those seeking to engage younger, tech-savvy visitors.

For Liu, the awards and accolades are a welcome validation, but what drives her isn’t the trophy. It’s the idea that design can build bridges: between eras, between cultures, and between people. “Through our work, particularly in integrating design with cultural heritage, we have the opportunity to educate, inspire, and connect people,” Liu reflects. In a field often enthralled by either the new-new thing or nostalgic retro trends, Liu is crafting a space where new and old collaborate. As the 2025 design awards season continues to unfold, her work stands as a compelling reminder that the most forward-looking design can also be profoundly reverent. By embracing technology and tradition with equal empathy, Yefan Liu has created an experience that transcends time – and in doing so, she has affirmed that the future of design can honor history while lighting the way forward.

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