Hong here — Zhu is the family name. I’ve spent the last five years in Singapore, and the two decades before that in Beijing, China. I design, I write, and I photograph. Over time these have stopped feeling like three separate practices.
The design work has mostly happened inside large systems — Microsoft, Alibaba, Xiaomi; Windows, MIUI, and now Lazada, where I lead design across Southeast Asia and China. The titles are easy enough to list. What’s harder to put down is the question that has stayed with me through all of them: how a person remains legible to themselves inside an environment that keeps getting larger, faster, and more automated. That’s the work, underneath the interfaces.
I’ve also published several books — novels and essays, including Lost in Iceland, Take Time to Waste Your Life, and The World Traveler’s Dog — and translated Keep It Simple to bring early Apple design thinking into Chinese. The novel I’m writing now is in English, which is its own kind of migration. Writing is where I work on the things a product cycle has no patience for: time, memory, family, the small dislocations of moving between countries and languages.
Photography is the quietest of the three. I don’t think of it as a technical pursuit; I think of it as a way of slowing down enough to actually see something. In 2025 a series of mine received a Gold Award in the Xiaomi × Google photography program, which I took less as an achievement than as a permission slip — that images, too, can be a serious way of paying attention.
One thread has run underneath all of this since I was a kid. The first object I ever saved up for was a Walkman, and I’ve been a first-adopter ever since — new phones, laptops, speakers, even kitchen appliances tend to find their way to me before they’re sensible purchases. I spend more on technology and design than I can fully justify, and I’ve made peace with that. What I’m paying for isn’t really the screen. It’s everything around it: the weight in the hand, the sound of a fan, the way a surface catches light in a room I live in alone with it. A quiet, almost private pleasure — the kind good hardware gives off when no one is performing for anyone.
Lately a lot of my thinking has gone into AI — at work, where I’m folding it into product experiences and design workflows, and at home, where I use it as a writing and image-making collaborator. I don’t think of AI as a productivity tool. It feels more like weather: a new condition that is changing what authorship means, what systems are, and how any of us imagines the future.
I’m 45. I have a son, and a baby girl. I read more than I post. I travel whenever I can find a reason, or no reason. At this point in my life, I’m more interested in depth than scale, in judgment than titles, and in work that still means something a decade from now.
If any of that overlaps with what you’re working on or thinking about — design, writing, photography, AI, the longer arc of a creative life — I’d be glad to hear from you.
Two side rooms: the Team and Handy Craft.
