Hui-Ying is a design practitioner turned design historian. From a background in Product Design, she moved into Design History via Critical Theory, and taught in the departments of Product Design and Fashion at Nottingham Trent University between 2007 – 2010. Specialising in the consumer cultures of Japan in the 1980s and its Economic Bubble, Hui-Ying read for an AHRC-sponsored PhD in History of Design from the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. During the last few years she has been a Visiting Researcher at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, and has given talks at the Japan Foundation (London), and the AHRC on her research.
While Hui-Ying’s research has focused on the analysis of lifestyle and design magazines of Japan in the late-1980s, she is chiefly interested in how economic booms and theories of consumption intersect and impact lifestyle and design developments, and how the tensions where the local meet the international affect the creation of imagined communities.
Currently a Senior Lecturer in Product Design at Nottingham Trent University, she is a second year Module Leader for Design Studies, a member of the interdisciplinary and interinstitutional Creative Centre for Fluid Territories (CCFT), and has given talks and exhibited her research within the Mould Maps exhibition, Terraformers, with Bonington Gallery at Nottingham Trent University (October 2016).