Yiying Lu, Mensa Foundation-Sponsored Speaker

Designing for Belonging: Creativity Connects Us

What makes a design feel like it belongs? Drawing on two decades of cross-cultural creative work, Yiying Lu explores how visual language connects people across cultures. From the web cultural icon Twitter Fail Whale, to bringing Asian culture to billions of keyboards through 🥟 and 🧋 emojis, to localizing Disney for Shanghai and creating global brand identities, she shares how color, typography, and iconography can make cultures feel seen and communities feel connected.

Yiying Lu is an award-winning artist, designer, and creative leader working at the intersection of art, technology, culture, and human experience. She is the creator of Twitter’s iconic Fail Whale and has designed and successfully proposed six emojis adopted into the Unicode Standard, including the dumpling 🥟 and boba tea 🧋.

She previously served as Global Creative Director at 500 Global and as a San Francisco Arts Commissioner. She currently leads Happy Creative Land, a San Francisco-based innovation studio, and serves as an Adobe Global Creative Ambassador and a committee member of the UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures at Stanford.

Her creative collaborations have included Disney, Apple, Google, Airbnb, Adobe, and NYU Shanghai, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TIME, The Atlantic, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal. She has been recognized by Fast Company as one of its Most Creative People in Business, by Microsoft as a Top 10 Leader in Innovation, and by the Shorty Awards as its inaugural winner in Design.

Born in Shanghai, educated in Sydney and London, and based in San Francisco, Lu brings a cross-cultural perspective to the ways design and storytelling create connections across cultures, communities, and generations.

This speaker is made possible thanks to our premier sponsor, The Mensa Foundation