The International Awards Associate (IAA) announced Yiqi Zhao MDes ’20 as a Gold Winner in Mixed Reality at the 2025 French Design Awards. This prestigious accolade celebrates outstanding, innovative achievements in global design that set new standards for creativity, functionality, and cultural impact. This year, the awards received over 2,000 entries worldwide, including submissions from leading brands and independent designers.

Yiqi Zhao stood out with their innovative project, The Holo Flower Brain, a real-time data visualization interface that poetically visualizes daily brain events. Thomas Brandt, IAA spokesperson, praised Zhao’s work as a pinnacle of design innovation, inspiring the global design community with their unique vision and relentless pursuit of excellence.

Yiqi Zhao, a Product Design Lead at Meta, is renowned for her work in AI creation for spatial computing across Meta Quest lines, mobile, and other wearables. Zhao recently joined an esteemed panel of global XR Design Challenge judges. According to Zhao, a successful XR design should be intuitive, tell a compelling story, be visually stunning, solve real-world problems, and be accessible to all users.

Photo courtesy of Yiqi Zhao.