Written by Ethan M. Stone
Wenxi Qi is an award-winning designer and product strategist whose work sits at the intersection of design, behavioral research, and emerging technology. Over the past decade, she has become known for helping startups and innovation-driven companies translate ambitious ideas into products that are commercially viable, culturally resonant, and emotionally intuitive. Clients often bring her in at the earliest stages of product and strategy development, not just for execution, but for her ability to determine what is worth building and how it should be built.
As of April 2026, Qi has led her studio, Aproject Factory, and client collaborations to more than 100 international design awards across product, systems, and conceptual design categories. Her personal work has also been recognized by major international design institutions, including the iF Design Award, IDEA Awards, A' Design Award & Competition, International Design Awards, and multiple honors across the International Awards Associate award programs. These recognitions reflect more than aesthetic excellence. They point to sustained recognition for innovation, human-centered thinking, systems design, and applied impact.
What distinguishes Qi’s work, however, is not simply the number of products she has designed or the number of awards she has received. It is the field she has spent nearly a decade building a distinct methodology in design for emotional well-being. While much of the design industry remains focused on usability, efficiency, and optimization, Qi’s work asks a different question: what if design could also help people regulate, process, and respond to their emotional lives?
That question has become the foundation of her practice. Qi specializes in translating emotional regulation and psychological support into tangible tools, systems, and everyday interactions. Drawing from behavioral psychology, sensory design, and emotional regulation research, her work explores how design can make emotional support more visible, intuitive, and usable in daily life.
Rather than treating emotional well-being as an abstract concept or purely clinical concern, Qi approaches it as a design problem, one that can be observed, prototyped, and embedded into the environments people already move through.
Her central methodology is simple: translate emotional support into physical experience. Qi does not design for diagnosis. She designs for response. Her work begins by identifying common emotional states such as anxiety, suppression, irritability, emotional fatigue, and overwhelm, then translating them into tangible prompts, sensory interactions, and behavior-based tools that help users recognize and respond to emotional states before escalation.
In Qi’s framework, emotional support becomes something people can interact with, not just something they are expected to understand conceptually.
One of the clearest expressions of this methodology is Ayama, her award-winning concept exploring breath regulation through physical interaction rather than digital instruction. Designed as a handheld object that expands and contracts rhythmically in the user’s hand, the device guides breathing through tactile motion instead of screens.
The project received the 2019 iF Design Award and became an early example of how emotionally supportive design could move beyond wellness aesthetics into functional behavioral intervention. Her approach, using tactile interaction to guide breath and regulate emotional state, was later adopted by startups in the emotional wellness space and translated into commercialized consumer products.
Her later work expanded this thinking into broader systems. With Emotional First Aid Kit, Qi reimagined emotional support through the logic of emergency care. The project treats emotional distress not as something vague or delayed, but as something that can be identified, responded to, and supported in real time.
Built as a system of immediate coping tools combining physical, sensory, and behavior-based interventions, it translates common emotional states into actionable support mechanisms for work, study, and domestic environments. The project reframes emotional care not as occasional self-help, but as a learnable and repeatable support system.
This same thinking has also extended into her work in consumer technology. Through PaniniClub, Qi has explored how consumer electronics can be redefined as emotionally resonant everyday objects, not just tools, but emotional anchors and cultural artifacts.
That approach generated strong organic user engagement online and led to PaniniClub being invited to exhibit at ComplexCon, one of the most influential cultural festivals in the United States, validating emotional resonance as a viable design strategy within consumer electronics.
Taken together, these projects reflect the central belief that defines Qi’s practice: emotional well-being should not remain abstract, private, or difficult to access. It should be something design can make tangible, visible, and easier to navigate in everyday life.
That same systems thinking extends beyond products. In recent years, Qi has also applied this design logic to community building, creating platforms that make resources, opportunity, and support more visible and accessible.
Through her ongoing work with the 9K Club founder community and the Industrial Designers Society of America Dallas–Fort Worth chapter, she has expanded her practice from product design into ecosystem design.
Across products, systems, and communities, Qi’s work follows a consistent principle: support systems only become meaningful when they are designed to be accessible.
Her work suggests a broader future for design, one in which designers are not only shaping what people use, but how people cope, recover, and function.
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