Helen He · Designer & Software Engineer
Making intelligent systems clearer, kinder, and easier.
I work across consumer products, AI, and technical systems, especially where people need to understand what the technology is doing and stay meaningfully in control.
Header artwork: Pillars of Memory, an original composition rendered with Midjourney.
A designer’s job is not to add. It is to remove everything between a person and what they came to do.
Make complexity legible
Structure information so the right thing is obvious at a glance, even when the system underneath it isn’t.
Designed for humans
Systems should meet people with patience: forgiving of error, honest about state, generous with guidance.
Reduce friction, not understanding
Remove unnecessary effort between intent and action without hiding the information or control people actually need.
Previously at
Featured Work
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NASA Playbook Constraints
Making invisible scheduling rules readable, visible, and actionable for mission planning.
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NASA Playbook Iconography
Redesigning a visual language for faster recognition in a dense NASA scheduling tool.
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Spotify (Re)Wrapped
Helping listeners rediscover the songs they saved, loved, and accidentally buried.
Side Explorations
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Pillars of Memory
Transforming everyday phone photos into translucent towers of color, light, and almost-remembered places.
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Vessels of Memory
Phone photos transformed into glowing acrylic vessels, preserving everyday memories as delicate objects of light.
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Swift, Styled
An AI-assisted visual experiment translating Swift and SwiftUI concepts into tactile, high-fashion metaphors.
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Rodimus: Designing Trust Around Waste
A speculative AI concept exploring how feedback, visibility, and system trust shape everyday recycling behavior.
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Virtual Vogue: Testing Embodied AR
An HCI study exploring whether virtual clothing can influence attention, creativity, and self-perception.
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Optimizing the Brew: A Coffee Ritual
A tiny time-motion study using human-factors methods to reduce friction in an everyday dorm coffee routine.
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Mixed (Im)Materiality
A soft motion study of color, light, and the shifting boundary between physical and digital material.
Experimental Systems
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Into the Poppyverse: An Interactive Map
A spatial interface for exploring relationships across a nonlinear fictional universe.
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The Engine Codex
An experimental archive for organizing a large speculative taxonomy of engines, drives, entities, and related phenomena.
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Latent Exploration
Coming soon.
About
Helen He is a designer and software engineer interested in how people understand and interact with increasingly complex technology.
Her work spans consumer products, AI, aerospace, and experimental systems, with a particular interest in interfaces that make system behavior, state, and uncertainty easier to understand.
At Stanford, she studied computer science, human-computer interaction, AI, and architectural design, a combination that left her suspiciously interested in both the interface and whatever complicated machinery is hiding behind it.
In quieter hours, she likes to illustrate and photograph stray light patterns on walls.