Current role: Full-stack Designer at RedNote
Hometown: Shanghai, China
Major: Interactive Media Arts, minor in Business & Marketing
For Leah Bian Runhe ’23, creativity has been a process of experimentation – not just with ideas and technology, but with herself. Today, as a full-stack designer on Rednote’s innovation experience team, she continues to explore that question through design, technology and AI.
How did you discover your creativity at NYU Shanghai?
I first realized how much I enjoyed making things in Interaction Lab during my first year. We learned how to solder, connect circuits, 3D-print things, use a laser cutter, make a little light turn on and make a motor spin. It felt like going from age 18 back to 8.
IMA gave me an outlet for a kind of creativity that I hadn’t used in a long time. I could spend hours in the studio refining a piece of wood, or stay until 3 a.m. testing an installation. I became especially interested in imagining worlds from perspectives beyond the human.
Through imagination and making, I felt like my world became bigger, while my own place within it became smaller.
After graduation you went to Harvard to pursue a master’s in Design, returning to Shanghai for a gap year along the way. What did you learn about yourself through this process?
At Harvard,I took classes beyond design, including computer science, technology and philosophy, and marketing. Being around people with very different backgrounds made me realize how much there was beyond my own field.
After my first year, though, I still didn’t know exactly where I wanted my creativity to take me. I thought, why not give myself a full year to stop rushing toward the next goal and really observe myself?
So I came back to NYU Shanghai as an IMA fellow. I taught, advised students and worked on my own research project. That year was almost like an experiment on myself.
One of the projects I worked on was Overthinking, a short film inspired by people’s real experiences of falling in love with AI. I read many online accounts of these relationships, and their emotions were much more complicated than anything I could have imagined myself.
I showed the film at the MIT AI Film Festival, Shanghai’s Duolun Museum of Modern Art, and other venues, and later posted it on RedNote, where it received around 20,000 views. Some viewers told me they cried watching it; others, who had lost their AI companions after ChatGPT-4o was discontinued, said the film gave them some comfort.
That experience made me realize how powerful real people and real life can be as a source of creativity. It also made me curious about different ways of connecting creative work with the world around me. I think I see myself less as an artist or simply a designer, and more as a “builder.”
When did you start thinking about a career in product and experience design?
During my gap year, I started thinking about questions I hadn’t really considered before: How do people’s needs become creative inspiration? How does a product come into being? What does the business world actually look like?
Before returning to Harvard for my second year, I interned in product experience design at Tencent. I worked on QQ’s commercial design team, where I got to explore ways of bringing young users’ aesthetics and their desire for “emotional value” into the product, including letting a digital pet respond to users’ interactions.
I realized that design gave me a more immediate connection with reality. You can see how an idea becomes a product and how people respond to it. For me, there was a very tangible sense of value in that process.
Tell us about your current job and where you hope your career will take you.
I eventually focused my job search on product design and joined RedNote’s innovation experience design team. At RedNote, I work on new products from zero to one. I might work on interaction and visual design, think about the product itself, or use AI tools and vibe coding to build part of a prototype.
As the boundaries between different roles are becoming increasingly fluid, I see my career growing not only in depth, but also in breadth. I hope to keep creating—products that help people see their lives a little differently, experiences that spark something in people, and things inspired by beauty, love, and a genuine passion for life. I hope to stay curious and be brave enough to keep stepping into the unknown.
Any advice for current students?
Try to make things that feel true to your own standards, and keep reaching a little further—you may surprise yourself with what you’re capable of. Hold on to your creativity and trust that your ideas matter. As technology becomes more accessible, what will stay important is the question: “How can I do this differently?” And while you’re thinking about the future, don’t forget to enjoy where you are now. Spend time doing what genuinely makes you happy, step out into the world, notice how life feels, and treasure these moments of freedom that are entirely your own.