Available for Full-time Resume

About

My Chinese name is 启灵 (Qǐ-Líng), the wisdom from God.

Born July 2002 in Hunan, China. Currently an MFA candidate in Interactive Design & Game Development at Savannah College of Art and Design.

Beyond the portfolio

Four things I am when I’m not designing.

Riley in a car with a foster cat riding in a blue pet carrier.

Foster volunteer

As an international student I cannot promise a cat a forever home. But I have 15 years of living with cats that I can lend to shelters.

Sidewalk chalk mural lettered “I am the vine, you are the branches”.

Christian

Grew up in the church; a big part of my leisure time is still spent with my church fellows.

Riley on the SCAD lawn at sunset.

Student ambassador

Gifted with the talent for being a tour guide. I never tire of leading ten busloads of visitors through campus in a single morning.

Black-and-white line illustration of two robed figures.

Game fan artist

Let’s chat if you are also a fan of FromSoftware.

Experience

  • Sole designer-developer on a cross-store order tracking PWA replacing paper handoffs across 3 retail locations; designed a 5-state order lifecycle and shipped an OCR intake pipeline (Tesseract + OpenCV) reaching ~85% extraction accuracy on production tickets.
  • Owned the customer site redesign end-to-end as design lead to an outsourced engineering team. UX audit, IA restructure, and a tokenized UI kit handed off as production-ready CSS variables.
  • Launched the brand’s social presence from zero across 5 platforms, defining voice, content pillars, and a per-platform publishing cadence.
  • Led a 9-person team to redesign a smart home app integrating AI-powered personalization, biometric data streams (Apple Health, Oura), and inclusive design into core product strategy.
  • Delivered end-to-end interaction concepts and spatial UI prototypes, simplifying multi-sensory home control into a personalized health-centric experience.
  • Redesigned a B2B financial portal for thousands of regulated users, consolidating 23 portals into one hub and eliminating 64% of session fragmentation and redundant authentication friction.
  • Translated user research into an AI-assisted compliance dashboard with real-time feedback loops, reducing workflow complexity for regulatory operators.
  • Built a RAG-based AI assistant (OpenAI API + Pinecone vector DB) for real-time ACL recovery guidance within a 72-hour sprint; nominated for the J&J “Best Concept” award.
  • Won the IDA International Design Award, MUSE Design Award and New York Product Design Award as UI designer and presenter, in a week-long startup competition with a 4-person team.

Education

M.F.A. Interactive Design
Savannah College of Art & Design, expected Mar 2027
Sept 2024 – Mar 2027
B.A. Visual Communication Design
China Academy of Art
Sept 2020 – Jun 2024

I’m always open to thoughtful conversations, collaborations, and opportunities to contribute through design.

Best regards,

Riley Chen

qilingchen323@gmail.com