About

Three sectors, one method: research the system first, then redesign how it decides.

I’m Hsun-Ting Liu, a strategic and service designer. The work is always the same shape underneath: something tangled that a lot of people depend on, rebuilt into something they can actually use. I start with research, and I am only satisfied when something ships.

Currently: NYC · Parsons MS in Strategic Design & Management ’26 (Civic Service Design minor) · supporting a Japanese craft brand’s US market entry as a contract strategic designer.

The full Think Next co-creation cohort — student teams, ASUS staff, and TDRI facilitators — in the workshop hall — Corporate, nonprofit, commercial — three rooms, one year. What changes between them is who has to be convinced.

Harlem United staff members adding sticky notes to the journey wall during Workshop 1 — Corporate, nonprofit, commercial — three rooms, one year. What changes between them is who has to be convinced.

3sectors delivered in: government · corporate · nonprofit

3working languages: English · Mandarin · Japanese (JLPT N1)

5+years in service and design strategy

43corporate partnerships run end to end

How I got here

My first job was sitting between a director in Tokyo and VFX artists in Taiwan, scheduling a television series cut by cut in two languages. What broke was never the craft. It was that two teams meant different things by the same word, and nobody owned the gap.

I have been working on that gap ever since, at bigger scale. At Taiwan’s Design Research Institute I led YODEX — the country’s largest industry-academia design platform — through four cycles and 43 corporate partners. The job was never to design a product. It was to build the conditions in which a company and a student team could understand each other well enough to ship one.

Then I left to do the same work somewhere I had no standing at all. Parsons, New York, 2024. Since then: a luxury brand’s cabinetry business, a hygiene service for unhoused New Yorkers, and a century-old Japanese forge entering the US market — that last one in Japanese.

Three countries, three sectors, one problem. I keep choosing the translation.

The IAC kickoff assembly: a full hall of student teams and corporate partners at the season-opening matchmaking event — The YODEX season opening: every company and every student team in one hall, before anyone has agreed on anything.

How I work

Frame before solving

The move with the most leverage is usually further upstream than the brief suggests. At ASUS, putting internal alignment before co-creation changed what the whole engagement could deliver.

ASUS Think Next

Mechanisms over exhortation

People collaborate when the system makes it the easy option. YODEX got better because we redesigned the briefs, the matching and the translation roles, not because we asked anyone to try harder.

YODEX

Dignity is operational

A value only counts once it survives contact with operations: a queue you can see, a shelf for your belongings, a commission that pays for the work it actually asks of you.

Beyond the Shower

How I read a client’s design maturity

Running design programs across dozens of companies taught me how far apart they are. The same proposal can be obvious to one client and unreadable to the next. So I read which rung a client is standing on, then design the move one rung up.

Design-driven innovation: design shaping which problems a business takes on and how it decides, not only how the output looks.

Where each engagement reached. What matters is the direction of travel: design moving from form-giving toward a seat in the decisions.

Experience

2025 – presentIndependent: Contract strategic designer — US market entry for a Japanese kitchenware brand, in Japanese; a service pilot with Harlem United.
2024 – 2026Academia: Parsons School of Design — MS Strategic Design & Management, Civic Service Design minor. Client studios with Waterworks and Harlem United.
Mar – Jul 2024Consulting: PwC Taiwan — Digital Transformation Consultant — SME digital-transformation case studies for Taiwan’s Administration for Digital Industries.
2020 – 2023Government: Taiwan Design Research Institute — Design Project Manager / Strategic Designer — Led YODEX (4 program cycles, 3-person team) and ASUS Think Next. Co-authored the national circular design guidelines.
2018 – 2020Government: Taiwan Design Research Institute — Project Coordinator — Taiwan Good Agriculture, a US$1.3M-a-year government brand program, rebuilt from one-to-one counseling to a scalable model.
2017 – 2018Corporate: Digi Miracle — Project Manager (intern) — VFX delivery for Toei’s Mob Psycho 100: per-cut scheduling and JP↔ZH translation between Tokyo and Taiwan.

Practice

Workshop design & facilitation

ASUS executives converging on five priorities. 30+ sessions across YODEX. Harlem United staff, on a Tuesday shift.

The IAC exhibition wall at the national design show: a physical network diagram threading companies to student teams

Cross-disciplinary collaboration

Curators, engineers, packaging designers, VFX artists. I have almost never worked in a room of only designers.

The immersive projection theatre: Palace Museum artefacts drifting across a curved wall and reflected in the polished floor

Technology & AI

A queue app with privacy written into the data model. Projection carrying museum content. AI-assisted synthesis since 2025.

Two forged-iron TANGETSU pans seen from above, the hammered surface catching the light against a dark steel ground

Japan

JLPT N1, a B.A. in Japanese literature, an exchange year in Tokyo. Currently working in Japanese with a century-old forge.

Briefing ASUS leadership in a meeting room, with the synthesized research wall — journey maps and clustered HMW votes — behind the table

Writing, speaking & community

Co-author of Taiwan’s national circular design guidelines. A four-year program strategy. Lead speaker at YODEX industry lectures.

One method, three kinds of proof. Reading who has to be convinced — and what they accept as evidence — is why it works in a ministry, a boardroom and a shower room.