At a time when much of the design industry views artificial intelligence primarily as a tool for improving efficiency, Nan He has advanced a more fundamental argument: AI’s most significant impact is not simply greater productivity, but a redistribution of creative agency.
This perspective is not based on theory alone. It has taken shape through her professional practice and is reflected in projects presented and recognized on major international platforms.
Reframing Narrative Power Through Design: Breaking News
In 2025, Nan He served as Design Lead for Breaking News, an interactive narrative installation exhibited in the alt.ctrl.GDC showcase at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The project was also named a finalist for the Independent Games Festival Audience Award, a prominent international recognition in the independent game industry.
At the center of Breaking News is a question that has consistently shaped Nan He’s design practice: when AI becomes part of the infrastructure through which content is created, where does the boundary lie between participation and manipulation?
The project turns AI-generated content into a central gameplay mechanism. Under time pressure, players assemble fragmented pieces of information into a “viral” news report. Through the interaction itself, the work reveals how creative control can be gradually and almost invisibly taken away in the information age.
As Design Lead, Nan He developed the visual and interaction system for the project’s multi-station experience. She coordinated the complete user journey, from video-based storytelling and evidence collection to conversations with AI characters and the final generation of a news report. Working within a highly experimental hardware environment, she ensured that the narrative structure and interaction design functioned as a cohesive whole.
Addressing a Structural Problem Through Product Design: KURA
While Breaking News critically examines the risks of AI-mediated creation, KURA represents Nan He’s constructive response to the same broader issue.
As a core member of the design team at BROADAR, INC., Nan He contributed to the development of KURA, a visual ideation and prototyping platform created specifically for users without formal design backgrounds. In 2026, KURA received a nomination from the UX Design Awards, an international program organized by the International Design Center Berlin, or IDZ, with a focus on innovation in user experience.
KURA addresses one of the least efficient stages of creative collaboration: the “0→0.5” stage, when non-designers struggle to clearly express ideas that are still vague or incomplete.
The problem is not necessarily that users lack aesthetic judgment. More often, they lack an accessible way to translate incomplete ideas into clear visual direction. Traditional AI image-generation tools typically require users to master complex prompt engineering, creating an invisible barrier for most decision-makers without professional design training.
One of the central innovations Nan He helped develop is KURA’s Dynamic Prompting system.
Users do not need to write prompts themselves. Instead, they can upload existing brand assets, reference images, logos, or color palettes and combine them with simple keyword-based descriptions. The system analyzes these multimodal inputs, converts them into structured Visual Intent, and generates personalized visual concepts for users to explore.
Users can express their needs in familiar language, while the system translates those needs into the language of design.
Another key feature of Dynamic Prompting is its adaptive guidance system. Rather than generating a single result and leaving users to evaluate it on their own, KURA interprets the information already provided, identifies what may still be missing, and suggests what the user could add next.
After a user uploads a logo, for example, the system may recommend adding references for visual style. After a reference image is provided, it may suggest possible typographic directions and color preferences. When a user describes a product objective, the system may recommend suitable layouts and design approaches.
The process of expressing a creative idea is therefore broken down into a natural sequence of decisions, rather than requiring users to provide a single, professionally formulated input at the beginning.
KURA also differs from the linear “generate and start over” model used by many AI tools. It treats each generated result as an editable design state.
Rather than forcing users to restart after every generation, the platform allows them to refine specific dimensions of an existing concept, including color mood, typographic style, compositional structure, brand consistency, and visual complexity. The process moves from open-ended exploration to precise control, while creative decision-making remains in the user’s hands.
KURA puts Nan He’s broader design philosophy into practice. For her, the value of AI lies not only in helping designers work more efficiently, but also in reshaping the relationship between non-designers and the creative process.
By giving people a more accessible way to articulate and develop visual ideas, KURA allows those who have ideas but lack a professional design vocabulary to participate more meaningfully in creation.
Sustained Recognition Across International Award Programs
Nan He’s work has also been recognized across a range of international design, digital media, and creative competitions.
Her distinctions include a Gold Award at the 2023 Hermes Creative Awards; selection for TERAVARNA Art Gallery’s Seventh Open exhibition in 2023; a Graphis Poster Honorable Mention in 2024; an AVA Digital Awards Honorable Mention; a Silver Award from the MUSE Awards; and recognition from the GDUSA Health+Wellness Awards.
Spanning graphic design, digital media, and health communication, these awards reflect Nan He’s ability to work across disciplines and demonstrate the continued recognition of her creative practice.
From Research to Industry
Before joining BROADAR, Nan He worked as a Brand Design Intern at China International Capital Corporation, or CICC, where she was responsible for promotional visual design for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, or WAIC, one of China’s most prominent conferences focused on artificial intelligence.
The experience allowed her to engage with the intersection of AI and design early in her professional career.
While studying at Virginia Commonwealth University, she also participated in human-centered design research related to disease transmission. The resulting work was formally presented as a poster at the NUiRA 2022 academic conference and received second place in the CVC Inspiring Image competition.
These experiences helped Nan He build a practice that connects design research, emerging technology, visual communication, and product development.
Conclusion
Nan He believes the next generation of design tools should not replace designers. Instead, they should serve as collaborative infrastructure that allows designers, founders, clients, and teams to participate more meaningfully in the creative process.
In her view, strong design is not only about execution. It is also about building shared understanding—helping people with different backgrounds and responsibilities develop a common language around ideas.
Through internationally recognized projects such as Breaking News and KURA, Nan He continues to explore how design can give people greater agency in an increasingly AI-mediated creative environment.
This is the direction she has continued to test through both critical and product-based work, and it is also the broader question she is encouraging the design industry to reconsider.
