Jiani Zeng. Jiani Zeng (zh:曾佳旎) is a Chinese designer, engineer, inventor, researcher, and businesswoman. She is known for being the co-founder of the San Francisco-based technology company Butlr Technologies.She is also known for inventing the 3D printing technology known as Illusory Material, which was named one of Time’s Best Inventions of 2021.

As a researcher, she has worked on projects for the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She has published research on topics such as multi-material 3D printing and thermal data applications.

Early life and education 
Zeng grew up in Hangzhou, China. Zeng graduated from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) with a bachelor’s degree in Product Design and Manufacture. She also received a master’s degree from MIT. For her master’s thesis, she wrote on voxel-based multi-material printing as a way to design objects.

Career 
After graduating from college, Zeng worked briefly as a product development engineer.After studying at MIT, Zeng founded Butlr with Honghao Deng as a startup in 2019.The company was a spinoff of MIT Media Lab. It develops products such as body heat sensors and occupancy data that gives buildings the ability to detect human presence and activity.

In 2020, Zeng and Deng unveiled Illusory Material, a 3D printing technology that combines lenticular lenses with colors or patterns to create a variety of 3D lenticular designs. This is done through 3D voxel printing and volumetric design, which can include shifting patterns, written content, and touch-sensitive visual effects. Zeng and Deng created several test items using the technology, including a perfume bottle (Nseen), a lollipop mold proptype (Loopop), and a sculptural lamp (Unream).Illusory Material went on to be named one of 2021’s best inventions by Time and won the “Experimental” category at Fast Company’s 2020 Innovation by Design Awards.

Zeng was also interviewed as part of the festivities at the Design Shanghai event in 2020.

Zeng was featured on the cover of the Summer 2023 issue of Innovation Magazine and also served as a guest contributor for the issue. Alongside Deng, she published an article about the aging population crisis for the World Economic Forum in 2023.

Zeng has also been featured in publications such as Financial Times,Dezeen, and Marie Claire Hungary.

Awards 

 2015 - Red Dot Best of the Best award for her entry “Optical Textiles” in the 3D Printed category
 2020 - IDEA (International Design Excellence Awards) Award
 2020 - Core77 Design Award
 2020 - Fast Company’s 2020 Innovation by Design Awards
 2020 - Platinum A’ Design Awards
 2021 - “Next Generation 2021” designer by Wallpaper Magazine
 2021 - Illusory Material named one of 2021’s best inventions by Time Magazine
 2022 - Forbes 30 Under 30 (North America) List for 2022

Selected publications 

 Zeng, J., Deng, H., Zhu, Y., Wessely, M., Kilian, A., & Mueller, S. (2021, October). Lenticular objects: 3D printed objects with lenticular lens surfaces that can change their appearance depending on the viewpoint. In The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (pp. 1184-1196)
 Zhang, X., Shtarbanov, A., Zeng, J., Chen, V. K., Bove, V. M., Maes, P., & Rekimoto, J. (2019, May). Bubble: Wearable assistive grasping augmentation based on soft inflatables. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6).

References 

Living people
Chinese designers
MIT Engineers
People from Jiangxi
21st-century Chinese women
Inventors
Year of birth missing (living people)