Dr Jiayu (Zoe) Wu
- Reader in Intelligent Mobility Design
- Intelligent Mobility MA
Jiayu is an innovation methods educator for technology and business integration, and a professional user experience designer for the new mobility and automobile industries.
Jiayu is an innovation methods educator for technology and business integration, and a professional user experience designer for the new mobility and automobile industries.
Jiayu lectures on the impact of design innovation approaches in business development and social engagement and works with businesses of all sizes on concept design generation and production. Her research interests include exploring how user experiences influence cutting edge technology in new and emerging markets and vice versa.
A Royal College of Art creative education graduate, she was previously head of Tsinghua x-lab’s Design Innovation Centre, where Jiayu specialised in incorporating design thinking in business development, industry joint projects and nurturing China’s most academically talented students' spinout projects. As a senior product developer at Volkswagen New Mobility Services, her focus was car-sharing service design, new mobility solutions and urban transportation trends, including rolling out pilots in cities across China. Her Industrial Design PhD at Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts and Design included a year at Aalto University, working on integrated technology user interaction experiences for Microsoft and Samsung. She has held assistant professor and lecturer positions after graduating from Jiangnan University’s School of Design, with expertise in communication design and digital interactions.
Jiayu leads and works on collaborative innovation research projects at the Intelligent Mobility Design Centre (IMDC), bringing together academics, industrial partners and students to design and deliver research and knowledge transfer projects for emerging mobility experiences. Projects at the IMDC include Hyundai Kia Innovation Laboratory projects Future Luxury, Emotional Tech and MORPH, the Greenwich Automated Transport Environment (GATEway), AHRC Design Fellows: Challenges of the future mobility, Inclusive Design for Shared Autonomous Vehicles. Her focus is digital integrated human experience and disruptive approaches for addressing existing and emerging mobility problems.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Research projects
More information
Practice
Jiayu is interested in human behaviour and the study of people’s reactions to products. Beyond the design of vehicles, Jiayu focuses on life changes and the interactions between vehicles and people, as well as vehicles and environments as emerging technologies evolve transportation to a future where individuals have unprecedented involvement in every facet of transportation services.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Selected publications
Robin Severs, Jiayu Wu, Cyriel Diels, Dale Harrow, Richard Winson (2026). Designing Shared Autonomous Vehicles for Age, Gender, and Disability Inclusion.Transport Research Arena, Re-Generation in Transport, Budapest.
Jiayu Wu, Sheila Clark, Ashley Kennard, Katrine Hesseldahl, Cyriel Diels (2024).Design for shared driverless vehicles of the future. The Design Journal, 28(2), 257–278.
Cyriel Diels, Jae-Seung Roe, Min Lee, Ilmin Nah, Jiayu Wu, Artur Mausbach, Dan Phillips, Dale Harrow (2023). Designing Joyful Journeys for Demand Responsive Transport (DRT). Proceedings of the Fourth International Comfort Congress, September 6-7 2023, Amberg, Germany.
Cyriel Diels, Kostas Stylidis, Farhana Safa, Cynthia Charwick, Herin Haramoto,Yichen Shu, Jiayu Wu, Dale Harrow. (2022) Towards a Data-Informed-Design (D-I-D) Framework for Autonomous Vehicle Design. 12th International Conference onDesign and Semantics of Form and Movement, DeSForM 2023 Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2023-07-04 - 2023-07-06.
Robin Severs, Jiayu Wu, Cyriel Diels, Dale Harrow, Joseph Singleton, Richard Winsor. (2022) Imagining an Inclusive Future for Shared Autonomous Vehicle Interiors: A Participatory Design Workshop Study. AutomotiveUI ’22 Adjunct Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications, pp 73-78.
Robin Severs, Jiayu Wu, Cyriel Diels, Dale Harrow, Richard Winsor. (2022) Inclusive Shared Autonomous Vehicles: Identifying areas for inclusive design intervention. INCLUDE 2022. Unheard Voices. 11th Inclusive Design Conference Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art.
Dale Harrow, Jiayu Wu. (2021) Chapter 8: Design for a future with driverless vehicles – acceptance and adoption. Cities for Driverless Vehicles – Planning the future built environment with shared mobility, pp183-217. ICE Publishing. London.
Robin Severs, Jiayu Wu, Cyriel Diels, Dale Harrow, Martin Uhlarik. (2021) Side-stepping future transport exclusion via an expanded inclusive design approach. Proceedings of IASDR 2021, With Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Jiayu Wu, Katrine Hesseldahl, Samuel Johnson, Sheila Clark, Dan Quinlan, Dale Harrow. (2021) Designing for Driver’s Emotional Transitions and Rituals. Proceedings of AutomotiveUI ’21. 13 th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications, pp 126-136.
Selin Zileli, Jiayu Wu, Cyriel Diels, Stephen Boyd Davis. (2021) Creating Artificial Societies through Interaction Analysis: Translating Qualitative Observational Study into Agent-Based Modelling. Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference (ALIFE).The MIT Press.
Jiayu Wu. (2020) AHRC Design Fellows: Challenges of the Future – Mobility. Arts and Humanities Research Council and Royal College of Art. London.
Jiayu Wu, Dale Harrow, Katrine Hesseldahl, Samuel Johnson, Sheila Clark, Dan Quinlan. (2020) Process Matters: from car owner experiences to automotive design proposals, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online.
Selin Zileli, Stephen Boyd Davis, Jiayu Wu. (2019) Towards Transparency Between the Autonomous Vehicle and the Pedestrian: Design and semantics of form and movement, In DeSForM19 Proceedings.
Jiayu Wu, Samuel Johnson, Katrine Hesseldahl, Daniel Quinlan, Selin Zileli, Dale Harrow. (2018) Defining Ritualistic Driver and Passenger Behaviour to Inform In-Vehicle Experiences. AutomotiveUI '18: Adjunct Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications, pp 72–76.
Jiayu Wu, Yipei Shen, Zhiyong Fu (2015), Design Driven User Study Workshop for Chinese Startup Innovation. IASDR2015, Interplay, 2–5 November 2015, Brisbane, Australia.
Jiayu Wu, Zhiyong Fu, Zhiyuan Liu, Xu Lin, Jiayu Tang, Jiajia Pan, Chen Zhao(2013), 'Creating Reflections in Public Emotion Visualization: Prototype Exploration on Traffic Theme', C&C Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition, pp 357–361.
Jiayu Wu, Zhiyong Fu, Zhiyuan Liu, Jiajia Pan, Huiling Long, Xu Lin, Haoqing He,Xinxiong Chen, Jiayu Tang (2012), City Flow: Prototype Exploration for Visualizing Urban Traffic Conversations. 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, pp 481–489.
Jiayu Wu (2012), Exploring the Value of Digital Tools in the Cultural Pattern: A Case Study of Breathing Life into Cultural Heritage. Chinese Journal of Art and Design, 2012:1, pp 97–99.
Jiayu Wu, Zhiyong Fu (2011), Studying on the using patterns of Chinese SNS platforms. RDURP’11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on The role of design in UbiComp research & practice, pp 37–40.
Zhiyong Fu, John Zimmerman, Jiayu Wu, Christopher Mustafa Kirwan, Chen Zhao (2011), The role of design in UbiComp research and practice. UbiComp’11: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing, pp 629–630.
Selected public presentations and invited talks
(2025) Keynote address “Making the Future of Mobility Accessible and Enjoyable” at the workshop “Shaping In-Vehicle Behaviours through Activity-Centred Design”, AutomotiveUI’25 18 th International ACM Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications. Brisbane, Australia.
(2024) Design Driven Approaches to Encourage Sharing on the Move,AutomotiveUI’24 17 th International ACM Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications. Stanford, United States of America.
(2023) Human Centred Design for the Future of Mobility. Beijing Design Week–Design Futures Forum. Beijing, China.
(2023) Where Next? Can e-vehicles help the car turn onto a new road?Map+Disegno. London, United Kingdom.
(2023) What is Intelligent Mobility? Royal College of Art IN SESSION TALK, as host joined by Martin M. Uhlarik, Head of Global Design, Tata Motors, and Rikesh Shah, Head of Open Innovation, Transport for London. London, United Kingdom.
(2021) Empathy Rooted Mobility Freedom. The 6 th Mobility Innovators Forum. Silicon Valley, United States of America.
(2021) Solving Urban Air Pollution and Green Mobility. The Great Exhibition Road Festival: One World Talks, Imperial College London. London, United Kingdom.
(2021) We Wanna Move: Opening the door on future mobility research. Inspire Talks, DLX Design Academy, University of Tokyo.
(2020) The Impact on Cities and Individual Travellers. Designing Intelligence into Our Cities Symposium, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom.
(2019) The Future Transportation Scenarios, Insights 2019: Designing the Future Life and Mobility Conference, Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
(2017) Problem Definition and Customer Segmentation - Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Insights from Silicon Valley, Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in collaboration with Facebook. Beijing, China.
(2016) X-researcher: the Self, the Team and the Business (course), Tsinghua x-lab in collaboration with the School of Economics and Management at the Tsinghua University. Beijing, China.
(2011) The Role of Design in UbiComp Research & Practice (workshop), the 13th ACM symposium on Ubiquitous Computing, Beijing, China.
