Design for Delight

Keynote Speaking at Stanford Women in Design 10th Annual Conference: Design for Delight

When the Stanford Women in Design team invited me to deliver the opening keynote at their 10th-anniversary conference “Design for Delight”, it felt like a homecoming. I didn’t just prepare a talk — I asked myself: What if I became the medium? I showed up as the woman artist emoji 👩🏻‍🎨, live and in person. When function meets fun, that’s where delight lives in design.

How do we create experiences that make people lean in, light up, feel something unexpected? That’s designing for delight. And it starts with how you show up.

Look at the word FUNCTION. The first three letters spell FUN. Our work must be functional — but the real question is: how do we bring the fun out of the function?

The conference theme, Design for Delight, sits at the center of my entire creative practice — from emojis that reshape how millions express themselves, to campaigns that bring cultural stories into global view.

I took the audience behind the scenes of several defining projects: the creative decisions, the cultural research, and the unexpected detours that shaped each outcome.

Featured Projects

🥟 Dumpling Emoji

🧋 Boba Tea Emoji

✨ Shanghai Disney Resort Opening

🌏 Airbnb Asian Night Market

The talk also turned toward the present: the visual storytelling workshops I’ve been facilitating across diverse communities — Stanford School of Medicine students, Bay Area lawyers, tech professionals, and children from underrepresented backgrounds. Each group arrives with a different relationship to creative confidence. All of them leave with stories told.

Self-expression is not a creative luxury. It belongs to everyone — including those who don’t believe they can draw.

A core argument of the keynote: AI-assisted tools like Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly, applied with care and intention, can genuinely lower the barrier to self-expression — not by replacing creativity, but by giving people a way in. Emotion, story, and meaning don’t require a fine arts degree. They require the right invitation.