Jiani Zeng

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Jiani Zeng (zh:曾佳旎) is a Chinese designer, engineer, inventor, researcher, and businesswoman. She is known for being the co-founder of the San Francisco-based technology company Butlr Technologies.[1][2]She is also known for inventing the 3D printing technology known as Illusory Material, which was named one of Time’s Best Inventions of 2021.[3][4][5][6]

As a researcher, she has worked on projects for the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[7][8] She has published research on topics such as multi-material 3D printing and thermal data applications.[9]

Early life and education

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Zeng grew up in Hangzhou, China.[10] Zeng graduated from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) with a bachelor’s degree in Product Design and Manufacture.[11] She also received a master’s degree from MIT.[7] For her master’s thesis, she wrote on voxel-based multi-material printing as a way to design objects.[12]

Career

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After graduating from college, Zeng worked briefly as a product development engineer.[7]After studying at MIT, Zeng founded Butlr with Honghao Deng as a startup in 2019.[1]The company was a spinoff of MIT Media Lab. It develops products such as body heat sensors and occupancy data that gives buildings the ability to detect human presence and activity.[1]

In 2020, Zeng and Deng unveiled Illusory Material, a 3D printing technology that combines lenticular lenses with colors or patterns to create a variety of 3D lenticular designs.[5][6][13] This is done through 3D voxel printing and volumetric design, which can include shifting patterns, written content, and touch-sensitive visual effects.[14][15] Zeng and Deng created several test items using the technology, including a perfume bottle (Nseen), a lollipop mold proptype (Loopop), and a sculptural lamp (Unream).[5][15]Illusory Material went on to be named one of 2021’s best inventions by Time and won the “Experimental” category at Fast Company’s 2020 Innovation by Design Awards.[3][4]

Zeng was also interviewed as part of the festivities at the Design Shanghai event in 2020.[16]

Zeng was featured on the cover of the Summer 2023 issue of Innovation Magazine and also served as a guest contributor for the issue.[17] Alongside Deng, she published an article about the aging population crisis for the World Economic Forum in 2023.[18]

Zeng has also been featured in publications such as Financial Times,[15]Dezeen,[19] and Marie Claire Hungary.[20]

Awards

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  • 2015 - Red Dot Best of the Best award for her entry “Optical Textiles” in the 3D Printed category[10][21][22]
  • 2020 - IDEA (International Design Excellence Awards) Award[23]
  • 2020 - Core77 Design Award[24]
  • 2020 - Fast Company’s 2020 Innovation by Design Awards[4]
  • 2020 - Platinum A’ Design Awards[25]
  • 2021 - “Next Generation 2021” designer by Wallpaper Magazine
  • 2021 - Illusory Material named one of 2021’s best inventions by Time Magazine[3]
  • 2022 - Forbes 30 Under 30 (North America) List for 2022[14][26]

Selected publications

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  • Zeng, J., Deng, H., Zhu, Y., Wessely, M., Kilian, A., & Mueller, S. (2021, October). Lenticular objects: 3D printed objects with lenticular lens surfaces that can change their appearance depending on the viewpoint. In The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (pp. 1184-1196)
  • Zhang, X., Shtarbanov, A., Zeng, J., Chen, V. K., Bove, V. M., Maes, P., & Rekimoto, J. (2019, May). Bubble: Wearable assistive grasping augmentation based on soft inflatables. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6).

References

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