A multidisciplinary creative director focused on turning uncertainty into clear, actionable direction through early concepts, framing, and creative systems.
Stella (Qinqin) Yang is a multidisciplinary creative director currently working on how creativity operates in an AI-native world. She explores how collective intelligence, computational reasoning, and future-oriented design can reshape the ways we sense, imagine, and construct possible worlds. Her work blends product innovation, experience design, strategic foresight, and speculative design to develop new frameworks for navigating and shaping future possibilities.
Her recent work focuses on the design of AI-native creative systems for strategy, concept development, and future-facing projects. Rather than treating AI as a set of tools, she explores how creative thinking changes when intelligence becomes distributed across humans, models, data, and systems.
She is the founder of Actual Fiction, a creative studio exploring new infrastructures for imagination and future-making. Its core project, Actual Future OS, is an AI-native creative system she is developing as a living environment for working with uncertainty — supporting signal sensing, pattern exploration, and early-stage direction finding.
Alongside her studio practice, she serves as International Partnerships and Promotion Lead at the Global Design Futures Network (GDFN), building collaborations across design, research, and technology. She previously co-founded alterR.studio, examining cultural, social, and technological shifts through system-level design.
Her practice moves fluidly between research, design, and speculative exploration, often using narratives and designed artifacts to probe emerging ways of living and organizing. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Master of Fine Arts in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. She also studied architecture in the Design Discovery program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work has been exhibited and recognized by the World Science Fiction Convention, Falling Walls Science Summit, Hyundai Motorstudio, Lumen Prize, Fast Company Innovation by Design, Core77, and WIRED Japan Creative Hack, and she holds several patents for innovative design concepts.
Her professional experience spans the mobile innovation team at J.P. Morgan Chase, senior creative planning at OUTPUT in Shanghai and Tokyo, and the Creative Science Track at NEW INC, the art and technology incubator of the New Museum. She has led creative work for the Tencent Science and Technology Museum, Burberry, the Palace Museum (The Forbidden City), and global launch programs for Transsion, and has collaborated with Boston Scientific, Uniqlo, and LVMH on next-generation products, experiences, and future strategies.
Currently based in Los Angeles, with past chapters across Tokyo, Shanghai, New York, San Francisco, and Paris, she works with creative teams, organizations and individuals to develop early concepts, define creative direction, and build working frameworks or prototypes when clarity is needed before committing to a certain path.
You can find her thinking and ongoing explorarion on Substack. And if you want to talk, collaborate, or explore ideas, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or email. Always open to connecting ︎