While hundreds of design awards are handed out each year, few carry the symbolic weight of a Red Dot Design Award. Widely regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious design honors, the Red Dot is an international mark of excellence – a prize that each year draws thousands of entries from over 60 countries to be judged by an independent jury of global experts. To receive this distinction as an individual designer, especially in the highly competitive UI/UX category, signals a creative talent operating at the very highest level of the field. In June 2025, UI/UX designer Tianyi Zhang joined that elite cohort when her project EcoEat earned a Red Dot Design Award, a defining milestone in her career and a testament to design’s power to drive change.
EcoEat is an AI-powered platform with a bold mission: reduce food waste by making sustainability effortless and rewarding. The project reimagines surplus food as an opportunity rather than a problem, connecting individuals and businesses in a seamless system for redistributing leftover food. Zhang led the design of EcoEat’s mobile consumer app (C2C) – crafting intuitive user flows and playful motion graphics – while collaborating on a tablet dashboard (B2B) for businesses. The result is a two-sided platform that blends rigorous systems thinking (coordinating communities and commerce) with emotional intelligence (understanding user motivations), yielding a tool that is both highly functional and quietly delightful to use.
Key features of EcoEat include AI-powered image recognition where users can post surplus food simply by snapping a photo. The app’s AI auto-fills item details, estimates shelf life, and even suggests whether to sell or donate the item – dramatically reducing the effort to list extra food. This automated, frictionless posting turns what used to be a chore into a one-tap task. The platform also features CO₂-saving gamification to keep sustainability engaging, visualizing the impact of every shared meal. The interface shows users the weight of food they’ve saved and the corresponding reduction in CO₂ emissions in real time. Every item rescued earns “green energy” points, turning environmental good deeds into a satisfying game-like experience.
EcoEat provides real-time feedback and tips with instant positive reinforcement. Users can track how much food they’ve shared, see live carbon footprint savings, and even receive leftover recipe ideas, cultivating a sense of immediate reward rather than guilt. Businesses get a comprehensive dashboard to bulk upload listings, receive AI-driven redistribution suggestions, and monitor their overall impact – ensuring that practicality and scalability make EcoEat as useful in a restaurant kitchen as it is in a home pantry. The platform emphasizes joyful, intuitive design from its vibrant red color theme to its friendly animations, designed to encourage sustainable habits through positivity. Red – chosen as the core theme color – symbolizes energy, action and appetite, making the experience feel “energetic and joyful” for users. Smooth transitions and cheerful visuals celebrate each saved meal. As Zhang explains, “the gamification system goes beyond playful animations; it’s designed to make sustainable choices feel intuitive and genuinely rewarding”. In short, EcoEat aims to motivate by satisfaction rather than shame, tapping into users’ sense of accomplishment and community impact.
This careful balance of purpose and playfulness is what defines EcoEat’s design ethos. The platform tackles a massive societal issue – the 30–40% of food that goes to waste each year in the U.S. alone – with a solution that is both scalable and emotionally engaging. “For businesses, we wanted EcoEat to be more than a tool. It had to be practical, scalable, and easy for teams to adopt,” notes Yitian Zeng, a senior product designer on the team. At the same time, every element of the user experience was crafted to spark a bit of joy, from the lively red visual identity to the bite-sized celebrations of each sustainable action. By blending system-level thinking with human-centered touches, EcoEat encourages sustainable behavior not through guilt, but through satisfaction and positive reinforcement – making the act of saving food feel less like a duty and more like an empowering habit.
It is this unique melding of functionality and feeling that caught the attention of the Red Dot jury in 2025. In their evaluation, jurors praised EcoEat as “a compelling example of how design can drive positive change, turning what might feel like a chore into a smooth and joyful experience”. Clean user flows and intuitive animations remove friction from sustainable actions, effectively transforming a once mundane task into something fluid, beautiful and engaging. Winning the Red Dot Design Award – judged by an international panel of dozens of experts and selected from thousands of global entries – places Zhang’s work in rarefied company. It’s an achievement that announces her as part of a global cohort of top creative talent, and underlines how UI/UX design excellence can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best in product, architectural, or industrial design.
For Zhang herself, the honor is both humbling and motivating. “Receiving a Red Dot is incredible, but it’s never just about the trophy,” she reflects. “The real reward is seeing people embrace more sustainable habits because the design makes it feel natural – even fun. If EcoEat can shift how we think about leftovers and reduce waste joyfully, that means more to me than any award.” This blend of humility and purpose is characteristic of a designer who has always emphasized impact over accolades. Zhang’s focus remains on what EcoEat represents: a proof of concept that digital design, done with care, can influence not only user behavior but even cultural norms around sustainability.
As the Red Dot jurors recognized, EcoEat is a movement. The platform’s success shows how thoughtful design can turn everyday actions into meaningful collective change. And for Tianyi Zhang, the Red Dot Award serves to crystallize her reputation as one of today’s most established designers, one who designs not for spectacle, but for transformation. In an age of countless apps and interfaces, Zhang’s work stands out for proving that a well-crafted digital experience can nudge society toward a greener future, one joyful interaction at a time.
