In May 2026, NYCxDESIGN 2026, New York City’s premier celebration of design, marked its fourteenth edition. As one of the world’s most influential annual design festivals, NYCxDESIGN continues to bring together leading designers, artists, and creative organizations from across the globe, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersection of design, technology, culture, and society.
Among its official exhibitions, Becoming, an art and design festival curated by NotYetArt, explored the evolving relationships between identity, creativity, and transformation. Organized into two thematic sections—Becoming Art and Becoming Design—the exhibition presented a diverse body of works spanning multiple artistic disciplines and design practices. Through a wide range of media, the participating artists and designers examined how contemporary creative practice responds to the ongoing evolution of society, human civilization, and emerging technologies, inviting audiences to reflect on the ever-changing relationship between humanity and the future.
Within this curatorial framework, Becoming does not signify the attainment of a fixed destination, but rather an ongoing state of transformation. Design is no longer understood merely as the creation of new objects; instead, it becomes a continuous process of questioning, reinterpreting, and reconstructing reality. Among the featured works, New York–based designer and creative technologist Nuoran Chen presents Third Eye, a speculative project that directly engages with the exhibition’s central theme while posing a provocative question about human cognition in the age of artificial intelligence: If the entity that ultimately requires redesign is not technology itself, but humanity, where, then, should design lead us?
Chen’s multidisciplinary practice spans product design, emerging technologies, accessibility design, and speculative art. He currently works as a Product Designer at The New York Times, where he leads mobile app subscription experience design for one of the world’s largest digital news platforms. Every day, millions of readers engage with global news through products shaped by his design work. Beyond his professional practice, Chen has been an active advocate for integrating accessibility into AI-assisted product development, creating open-source tools and design workflows that integrate accessibility standards throughout the entire lifecycle of design, engineering, and testing. His work reflects a broader commitment to ensuring that technological innovation advances not only efficiency but also equity and inclusivity.
Working at the forefront of global digital product development and artificial intelligence has led Chen to continually examine a fundamental question: What has technology truly transformed? In his view, artificial intelligence has altered far more than productivity. It is fundamentally reshaping the production of information, the circulation of knowledge, and the very architecture of human cognition. As increasing amounts of information are generated, filtered, and distributed by algorithms, access to knowledge has become unprecedentedly rapid. Yet at the same time, our capacity to critically evaluate information, trace its origins, and construct independent judgment risks gradual erosion. Technology continuously amplifies the capabilities of machines while quietly redefining the capabilities of humans themselves.
It is precisely this first-hand experience within the technology industry that gives Third Eye its urgency. Rather than representing an external critique of artificial intelligence, the work emerges from the perspective of a practitioner deeply familiar with the infrastructures that shape digital experience. Chen understands that contemporary interfaces often formulate questions before users do, subtly influencing public trust, directing attention, and constructing systems of value.
The “third eye” imagined in the project is neither an intelligent device nor a futuristic technological artifact. Instead, it is conceived as a speculative, bone-like parasitic organism that survives by attaching itself to the human skull. Feeding on AI-generated information circulating within its host’s environment, it establishes a stable yet complex symbiotic relationship with human cognition. Whereas artificial intelligence increasingly compresses complexity into optimized outputs and standardized answers, this speculative organ performs precisely the opposite function. It continuously performs forensic filtering, traces original sources, identifies altered, concealed, or deliberately omitted content, and exposes the uncertainties hidden beneath seemingly definitive conclusions. Humans provide it with an endless stream of information, while the organism restores the host’s capacity to distinguish reality from algorithmically mediated representations.
This reciprocal dependency constitutes the conceptual core of the entire project.
Significantly, Chen draws upon theoretical frameworks from accessibility design—including concepts such as assistive organs, compensatory systems, and prosthetic augmentation—while radically expanding their scope. Rather than addressing individual physical impairments, Third Eye reframes accessibility within the context of information civilization itself. If conventional accessibility design seeks to compensate for the bodily limitations of a minority, Chen asks a profoundly contemporary question: What if the true deficit emerging in the age of artificial intelligence is not an individual disability, but a collective decline in humanity’s cognitive agency? Under such circumstances, should design assume a new responsibility for what might be called cognitive accessibility?
Importantly, the work neither portrays artificial intelligence as an existential threat nor presents the new organ as a technological salvation. Instead, it constructs a far more nuanced ecology of coexistence. In attempting to overcome the cognitive consequences of AI, humanity becomes dependent upon another, even more intelligent organism. This dependency simultaneously functions as liberation and as a new form of constraint. Rather than resolving this paradox, the project invites viewers to inhabit it, encouraging reflection on the inseparable and continually evolving relationship between humans and technology.
Beyond its conceptual proposition, Third Eye is equally distinguished by its innovative narrative methodology.
Chen introduces what he terms “backwards narrative,” a speculative storytelling strategy that deliberately inverts conventional temporal structures. Rather than presenting Third Eye as a prototype from the future, he imagines that the organism has already completed its entire evolutionary trajectory, become extinct, and been rediscovered as a paleontological fossil unearthed from an archaeological site in the 22nd century. Consequently, audiences are confronted not with an imagined future but with an artifact of a future history. Time is fundamentally inverted: the future is narrated as the past, while the present is repositioned as an archaeological history yet to be excavated.
This temporal inversion lends remarkable credibility to the fictional world. Museum labels are written in the voice of an imagined archaeologist, formally identifying the organism as Oculus erlangensis and documenting its geological era, biological characteristics, evolutionary pathway, and historical symbiosis with humanity. The species epithet erlangensis references Erlang Shen, the Chinese mythological deity renowned for his third eye capable of discerning truth from illusion. By embedding this cultural symbol within the conventions of scientific taxonomy, Chen creates a compelling dialogue between Eastern mythology and speculative evolutionary biology, allowing the traditional notion of the “all-seeing eye” to acquire renewed significance within the age of artificial intelligence.
To further reinforce the credibility of this fictional universe, Chen developed an extensive and internally coherent design ecosystem surrounding the project. The skeletal anatomy of the parasitic organism was reconstructed through three-dimensional modeling based on scientific specimen documentation, deliberately adopting the visual language of natural history museums rather than commercial product visualization. A series of archaeological excavation images situates the fossil within simulated excavation sites, further strengthening the illusion of historical authenticity. Chen additionally designed a dedicated visual interface representing the perceptual experience of viewing the world through Third Eye itself. The synchronized blinking between host and organism establishes a subtle emotional bond between the two living entities while becoming one of the project’s most evocative visual motifs. The narrative ultimately culminates in an immersive short film, allowing viewers to experience the evolving relationship of mutual dependence and reciprocal transformation between humans and their symbiotic companion.
Viewed across Chen’s broader body of work, a consistent intellectual trajectory becomes apparent. Whether working in digital product design, accessibility design, or speculative art, his primary concern has never been technology in isolation, but rather the ways in which technology reshapes humanity itself. He continually asks whether design can still preserve independent thinking, whether it can restore our capacity to understand the world amid information overload, algorithmic governance, and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. For Chen, design is not merely the creation of tools; it is the construction of cognition. It transforms not only objects, but also the evolving relationship between humans and the world they inhabit.
For this reason, Third Eye should not be understood simply as a speculative vision of the future. Instead, it functions as a contemporary allegory addressed to the present. Through the convergence of speculative design, archaeological fiction, mythological symbolism, and accessibility theory, the project materializes the otherwise invisible psychological pressures, epistemic anxieties, and information crises characteristic of the AI era, rendering them tangible, discussable, and experientially accessible. In doing so, it encourages audiences to reconsider the profound yet often overlooked consequences accompanying technological acceleration.
Returning to the exhibition’s central theme—Becoming—one recognizes that its concern extends far beyond the evolution of design itself. Rather, it speaks to the continual transformation of humanity. As technology relentlessly reshapes the world, what undergoes the deepest metamorphosis is not simply our tools, media, or methods of production, but our capacities for perception, judgment, and understanding.
For CiCi Zhang, co-founder of NotYetArt, that is precisely why the work was selected:
We chose Third Eye from more than a hundred submissions because it refused the easy spectacle of AI and asked instead what the technology is quietly taking from us. Gave the idea a discipline, and a strange credibility, that stayed with visitors.
– Staging it as a fossil, she added.
Through Third Eye, Nuoran Chen reminds us that the enduring value of design may never have been the invention of the future alone, but its ability to help humanity see itself anew before that future fully arrives.